Ten Years in the Tub (19 page)

So who would
you
cast as these two? If the right actors ever existed, I'm betting that they wouldn't be much fun to hang out with on set, what with having no social lives, or girlfriends, or prospects of working in anything else ever, apart from
Copperfield 2: Heep's Revenge
. And once these cartoon gremlins take corporeal form, they lose their point anyway. Memo to studios: a mix of CGI and live action is the only way forward. True, it would be expensive, and true, no one would ever want to pay to watch. But if you wish to do the great man justice—and I'm sure that's all you Hollywood execs think about, just as I'm sure you're all subscribers to this magazine—then it's got to be worth a shot.

3)
    
In
The Old Curiosity Shop
I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P. G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his oeuvre. In
David Copperfield
, David's bosses Spenlow and Jorkins are what must be the earliest fictional representations of good cop/bad cop.

4)
    
I have complained in this column before about how everyone wants to spoil plots of classics for you. OK, I should have read
David Copperfield
before, and therefore deserve to be punished. But even the snootiest critic/publisher/whatever must presumably accept that we must all, at some point, read a book for the first time. I know that the only thing brainy people do with their lives is reread great works of fiction, but surely even James Wood and Harold Bloom read before they reread? (Maybe not. Maybe they've only ever reread, and that's what separates them from us. Hats off to them.) Anyway, the great David Gates gives away two or three major narrative developments in the
very first paragraph
of his introduction to my Modern Library edition (and I think I'm entitled to read the first paragraph, just to get a little context or biographical detail); I tried to check out the film versions on Amazon, and an Amazon reviewer pointlessly gave away another in a three-line review. That wouldn't have happened if I'd been looking for a Grisham adaptation.

5)
    
At the end of last year, I was given a first edition
David Copperfield
as a prize, and I had this fantasy that I was going to sit in an armchair and read a few pages of it, and feel the power of the great man enter me at my fingertips. Well, I tried it, and nothing happened. Also, the print was really small, and I was scared of dropping it in the bath, absentmindedly putting a cigarette out on it, etc. I actually ended up reading four different copies of the book. An old college Penguin edition fell apart in my hands, so I bought a Modern Library edition to replace it. Then I lost the Modern Library copy, temporarily, and bought another cheap Penguin to replace it. It cost £1.50! That's only about ninety dollars! (That was my attempt at edgy au courant humour. I won't bother again.)

There was a moment, about a third of the way through, when I thought that
David Copperfield
might become my new favorite Dickens novel—which, seeing as I believe that Dickens is the greatest novelist who ever lived, would mean that I might be in the middle of the best book I'd ever read. That superlative way of thinking ceases to become very compelling as you get older, so the realization wasn't as electrifying as you might think. I could see the logic, in the same way that you can see the logic of those ontological arguments that the old philosophers used to trot out to prove that God exists—Dickens = best writer,
DC
= his best book, therefore
DC
= best book ever written—without feeling it. But, in the end, there was too much wrong. The young women, as usual, are weedy. Bodies start to pile up in uncomfortable proximity—there are four deaths, if you count drippy Dora's bloody dog, which I don't but Dickens does—between pages 714 and 740. And just when you want the book to wrap up, Dickens inserts a pointless and dull chapter about prison reform, twenty pages from the end. (He's against solitary confinement. Too good for 'em.)

What puts David Copperfield right up there with
Bleak House
and
Great Expectations
, however, is its sweet nature, and its surprising modernity. There's some metafictional stuff going on, for example: David grows up to be a novelist, and the full title of the book, according to Edgar Johnson's biography (not that I can find any evidence of this anywhere) is
The Personal History, Experience and Observations of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery, which he never meant to be published on any account
. And there's a point to the
metafictional stuff, too. The last refuge of the scoundrel-critic is any version of the sentence, “Ultimately, this book is about fiction itself/this film is about film itself.” I have used the sentence myself, back in the days when I reviewed a lot of books, and it's bullshit: invariably all it means is that the film or novel has drawn attention to its own fictional state, which doesn't get us very far, and which is why the critic never tells us exactly what the novel has to say about fiction itself. (Next time you see the sentence, which will probably be some time in the next seven days if you read a lot of reviews, write to the critic and ask for elucidation.)

Anyway, David Copperfield's profession allows him these piercing little moments of regret and nostalgia; there's a lot about memory in this book, and in an autobiographical novel, memory and fiction get all tangled up. Dickens uses the tangle to his advantage, and I can't remember being so moved by one of his novels. The other thing that seems to me different about
David Copperfield
is the sophistication of a couple of the characters and relationships. Dickens isn't the most sophisticated of writers, and when he does attain complexity, it's because subplot is layered upon subplot, and character over character, until he can't help but get something going. But there's a startlingly contemporary admission of marital dissatisfaction in
Copperfield
, for example, an acknowledgment of lack and of an unspecified yearning that you'd associate more with Rabbit Angstrom than with someone who spends half the novel quaffing punch with Mr. Micawber. Dickens eventually takes the Victorian way out of the twentieth-century malaise, but even so… Making notes for this column, I find that I wrote “He's from another planet”; “Was he a Martian?” David Gates asks in the introduction. And to think that some people don't rate him! To think that some people have described him as “the worst writer to plague the English language”! Yeah, well. You can believe them or you can side with Tolstoy, Peter Ackroyd, and David Gates. And me. Your choice.

For the first time since I've been writing this column, the completion of a book has left me feeling bereft: I miss them all. Let's face it, usually you're just happy as hell to have chalked another one up on the board, but this last month I've been living in this hyper-real world, full of memorable, brilliantly eccentric people, and laughs (I hope you know how funny Dickens is), and proper bendy stories you want to follow. I suspect that it'll be difficult to read a pared-down, stripped-back, skin-and-bones novel for a while.

June 2004

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
Donkey Gospel
—Tony Hoagland

     
  
I Never Liked You
—Chester Brown

     
  
We Need to Talk About Kevin
—Lionel Shriver

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Random Family
—Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

     
  
What Narcissism Means to Me
—Tony Hoagland

     
  
Bobby Fischer Goes to Wa
r—David Edmonds and John Eidinow

T
he Polysyllabic Spree—the ninety-nine young and menacingly serene people who run the
Believer
—recently took their regular columnists out for what they promised would be a riotous and orgiastic night on the town. Now, I have to confess that I've never actually seen a copy of this magazine, due to an ongoing dispute with the Spree (I think that as a contributor I should be entitled to a free copy, but they are insisting that I take out a ten-year subscription—does that sound right to you?), so I was completely unaware that there is only one other regular columnist, the Croatian sex lady, and she didn't show. I suspect that she'd been given a tip-off, probably because she's a woman (the Spree hold men responsible for the death of Virginia Woolf) and stayed at home. It shouldn't have made much difference, though, because you can have fun with a hundred people, right?

Wrong. The Spree's idea of a good time was to book tickets for a literary event—a reading given by all the nominees for the National Book Critics' Circle Awards—and sit there for two and a half hours. Actually, that's not quite true: they didn't sit there. Such is their unquenchable passion for the written word that they were too excited to sit. They stood, and they wept, and they hugged each other, and occasionally they even danced—to the poetry recitals, and some of the more up-tempo biography nominees. In England we don't often
dance at dances, let alone readings, so I didn't know where to look. Needless to say, drink, drugs, food, and sex played no part in the festivities. But who needs any of that when you've got literature?

I did, however, discover a couple of books as a result of the evening: Tony Hoagland's
What Narcissism Means to Me
, which didn't win the poetry award, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's
Random Family
, which didn't win the nonfiction award. I haven't read the books that did win, and therefore cannot comment on the judges' inexplicable decisions, but they must be pretty good, because Hoagland's poems and LeBlanc's study of life in the Bronx were exceptional.