Ten Years in the Tub (16 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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It wasn't as if I didn't try; it was just that very little I picked up fit very well with my mood. I bought Flaubert's letters after reading the piece about Donald Barthelme's required reading list in the
Believer
[October, 2003], but they weren't rightâor at least, they're not if one chooses to read them in chronological order. The young Flaubert wasn't very rock and roll. He was, on this evidence, kind of a prissy, nerdy kid. “friend, I shall send you some of my political speeches, liberal constitutionalist variety,” he wrote to Ernest Chevalier in January 1831; he'd just turned nine years old. Nine! Get a life, kid! (Really? You wrote those? They're pretty good books. Wellâ¦ Get another one, then.) I am probably taking more pleasure than is seemly in his failure to begin the sentence with a capital letter. You know, as in, Jesus, he didn't know the first thing about basic punctuation! How did this loser ever get to be a writer?

Francis Wheen's
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
was a better fit, because, well, it rocks: it's fast and smart and very funny, despite being about how we have betrayed the Enlightenment by retreating back to the Dark Ages. Wheen wrote a warm, witty biography of Marx a few years back, and has a unique, sharp, enviable, and trustworthy mind. Here he dishes it out two-fisted to Tony Blair and George W. Bush, Deepak Chopra and Francis Fukuyama, Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton and Jacques Derrida, and by the end of the book you do have the rather dizzying sensation that you, the author, and maybe Richard Dawkins are the only remotely sane people in the entire world. It's difficult to endorse this book without committing a few cardinal
Believer
sins: as you may have noticed, some of the people that Wheen accuses of talking bullshit are, regrettably, writers, and in a chapter entitled
“The Demolition Merchants of Reality,” Wheen lumps deconstructionism in with creationism. In other words, he claims there isn't much to choose from between Pat Buchanan and Jacques Lacan when it comes to mumbo-jumbo, and I'm sorry to say that I laughed a lot. The next chapter, “The Catastrophists,” gives homeopathy, astrology, and UFOlogy a good kicking, and you'll find yourself conveniently forgetting the month you gave up coffee and mint because you were taking arnica three times a day. (Did you know that Jacques Benveniste, one of the world's leading homeopathic “scientists,” now claims that you can
email
homeopathic remedies? Yeah, see, what you do is you can take the “memory” of the diluted substance out of the water electromagnetically, put it on your computer, email it, and play it back on a sound card into new water. I mean, that could work, right?)

Richard Dawkins, Wheen recalls, once pointed out that if an alternative remedy proves to be efficaciousâthat is to say, if it is shown to have curative properties in rigorous medical trialsâthen “it ceases to be an alternative; it simply becomes medicine.” In other words, it's only “alternative” so long as it's been shown not to be any bloody good. I found it impossible not to apply this helpful observation to other areas of life. Maybe a literary novel is just a novel that doesn't really work, and an art film merely a film that people don't want to seeâ¦
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
is a clever-clogs companion to Michael Moore's
Stupid White Men
; and as it's about people of both sexes and every conceivable hue, it's arguably even more ambitious.

I read
Liar's Poker
, Michael Lewis's book about bond-traders in the eighties, for two reasons, one of which was Wheen-inspired: he made me want to try and be more clever, especially about grown-up things like economics. Plus I'd read Lewis's great
Moneyball
a couple of months previously [see “Stuff I've Been Reading,” Dec. 2003/Jan. 2004], so I already knew that he was capable of leading me through the minefields of my own ignorance. It turns out, though, that the international money markets are more complicated than baseball. These guys buy and sell mortgages! They buy and sell risk! But I haven't got a clue what any of that actually means! This isn't Michael Lewis's faultâhe really did try his best, and in any case you kind of romp through the book anyway: the people are pretty compelling, if completely unlike anyone you might meet
in real life. At one point, Lewis describes an older trader throwing a ten-dollar bill at a young colleague about to take a business flight. “Hey, take out some crash insurance for yourself in my name,” the older guy says. “I feel lucky.” As a metaphor for what happens on the trading floor, that's pretty hard to beat.

Francis Wheen's book and Paul Collins's
Not Even Wrong
were advance reading copies that arrived through the post. I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because quite clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. I had no idea I wanted to read Wheen's book until it arrived, and it was because of Wheen that I read Lewis, and then
Not Even Wrong
turned up and I wanted to read that too, and Buchan's
Greenmantle
got put to one side, I suspect forever. Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g. books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.

Having said that I hardly ever read books about autism. I have now read two in the last few weeks. Paul Collins, occasionally of this parish, is another parent of an autistic kid, and
Not Even Wrong
, like Charlotte Moore's
George and Sam
, is a memoir of sorts. The two books are complementary, though; while writing unsentimentally but movingly about his son Morgan's diagnosis and the family's response, Collins trawls around, as is his wont, for historical and contemporary illustration and resonance, and finds plenty. There's Peter the Wild Boy, who became part of the royal household in the early eighteenth century, and who met Pope, Addison, Steele, Swift, and Defoeâhe almost certainly played for our team. (Autistic United? Maybe Autistic Wanderers is better.) And Collins finds a lot of familiar traits among railway-timetable collectors, and Microsoft boffins, and outsider artistsâ¦ I'm happy that we're living through these times of exceptionally written and imaginative memoirs, despite the incessant whine you hear from the books pages; Collins's engaging, discursive book isn't as raw as some, but in place of rawness there is thoughtfulness, and thoughtfulness is never a bad thing. I even learned stuff, and you can't often say that of a memoir.

New Year, New Me, another quick read of Gillian Riley's
How to Give Up Smoking and Stay Stopped for Good
. I have now come to think of Riley as our
leading cessation theorist; she's brilliant, but now I need someone who deals with the practicalities.