Ten Years in the Tub (42 page)

I do wish that comic writing took itself more seriously, though. I don't mean I want fewer jokes; I simply mean that the cumulative effect of those jokes would be funnier if they helped maintain the internal logic of the book. Mole has a blind friend, Nigel, to whom he reads books and newspapers, and at one point Nigel accuses him of not understanding much of what he's reading. “I had to admit that I didn't,” Mole says, before, just a few pages later, making an admittedly inappropriate allusion to Antony Beevor's
Stalingrad
. It might seem pedantic to point out that anyone who's plowed their way through
Stalingrad
is probably capable of grasping the essence of a newspaper article (if not the opening of an Iain M. Banks novel)—just as it's probably literal-minded to wonder how an unattractive man with a spectacularly unenviable romantic history gets repeatedly lucky with an extremely attractive woman. But moments like this tend to wobble the character around a little bit, and I found myself having occasionally to recreate him in my head, almost from scratch. I'm sure that Mole has a fixed identity for those who have read the entire series, and he remains a fantastic, and fantastically English, comic creation: upright and self-righteous, bewildered, snobby, self-hating, provincial, and peculiarly lovable. We all are, here.

Jon Ronson's
The Men Who Stare at Goats
is one of the most disorienting books I have ever read. While reading it, I started feeling like the victim of one of the extremely peculiar mindfuck experiments that Ronson describes in his inimitable perplexed tones. Here's his thesis: after the rout in Vietnam, the U.S. military started investigating different ways to fight wars, and as a consequence co-opted several somewhat eccentric New Age thinkers and practitioners who, your generals felt, might point them toward a weaponless future, one full of warriors capable of neutralizing the enemy with a single glance. And the first half of the book is uproarious, as Ronson endeavors to discover, for example, whether the actress Kristy McNichol (who appeared in
The Love Boat 2
and the cheesy soft porn movie
Two Moon Junction
), had ever been called upon to help find Manuel Noriega. (A U.S. Sergeant called Lyn Buchanan, who was part of
a secret unit engaged in a “supernatural war” against Noriega, had repeatedly written her name down while in a self-induced trance, and became convinced that the actress knew something.) Gradually Ronson builds a crazy-paving path that leads to Abu Ghraib, and both the book and its characters become darker and more disturbing.

You have probably read those stories of how people in Iraq and Afghanistan were tortured by having American pop music blasted at them day and night. And you have probably read or heard many of the jokes made as a consequence of these stories—people writing in to newspapers to say that if you have a teenager who listens to 50 Cent or Slipknot all day then you know how those Iraqi prisoners feel, etc. and so on. (Even the
Guardian
made lots of musical torture jokes for a while.) Ronson floats the intriguing notion that the jokes were an integral part of the strategy: in other words, if you can induce your citizens to laugh at torture, then outrage will be much harder to muster. Stupidity is, despite all appearances to the contrary, a complicated state of mind. Who's stupid, in the end—them or us?

This month's Book by a Friend was Melissa Bank's
The Wonder Spot
, and this paragraph must be parenthetical, because neither the novel nor the friend can be shoehorned into the stupid theme. It's been a long time since
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
, and some of us—including the author herself—were wondering whether she'd ever get around to a second book. But she has, finally, and it's a lovely thing, sweet-natured, witty, lots of texture. It's hard to write, as Bank does here, about growing up, and about contemporary adult urban romance: It's such an apparently overpopulated corner of our world that she must have been tempted, at least for a moment, by artifacts and dying suns and women who are pregnant for decades. We need someone who's really, really good at that stuff, though, because it still matters to us, no matter how many millions of words are written on the subject. In fact—and once again in these pages I'm calling for Soviet-style intervention into the world of literature—it would be much easier for everyone if Melissa Bank and maybe two or three other people in the world were given an official government license, and you could no more appoint yourself as chronicler of contemporary adult urban romance than you could set yourself up as a neurosurgeon. In this Utopia,
Melissa Bank would be… well, you'll have to insert the name of your own top neurosurgeon here. I don't know any. Obviously. I'm too dim. Damn that Iain M. Banks. He's wrecked my confidence.

Here's an unlikely new subgenre: biographical studies of vagrants. Alexander Masters's
Stuart: A Life Backwards
is, after
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
, the second one I've read recently, and if these two are as successful as they should be, then on top of everything else, down-and-outs may have to contend with the unwanted attentions of hungry nonfiction writers. At the moment, there's still plenty of room in the field for tonal contrast; where Nick Flynn's book about his homeless, alcoholic father was poetic, as deep and dark and languid as a river,
Stuart
is quick, bright, angry, funny, and sarcastic—Masters finds himself occasionally frustrated by Stuart's inexplicable and self-destructive urge to punch, stab, self-lacerate, incinerate and cause general mayhem. (“I headbutted the bloke,” Stuart explains when Masters asks him what happened to a particular employer and job. “Excellent. Of course you did. Just the thing,” Masters finds himself thinking.)

The story is told backwards at Stuart's suggestion, after he'd told Masters that his first draft was “bollocks boring”; he thinks the narrative structure will pep it up a little, turn it into something “like what Tom Clancy writes.” It feels instead like a doomed search for hope and innocence; as Masters trudges back through three decades of illness and drug abuse and alcohol abuse and self-abuse and the shocking, sickening abuse perpetrated by Stuart's teachers and family members, he and we come to see that there never was any. This is an important and original book, and it doesn't even feel as though you should read it. You'll want to, however much good it's doing you.

I'm certain that I read five books all the way through in the last month, and yet I've written about only four of them. This means that I've forgotten about the other one completely, the first time that's happened since I began writing this column. I'm sorry, whoever you are, but I think you've got to take some of the blame. Your book was… well, it was good, obviously, because we are forced by the Polysyllabic Spree, the sixty-three white-robed literary maniacs who run this magazine, to describe every book as good. But clearly it could have been better. Try a joke next time, or maybe a plot.

August 2005

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
Gilead
—Marilynne Robinson

     
  
The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup
—Susan Orlean

     
  
Housekeeping
—Marilynne Robinson
^a
a

     
  
You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination
— Katharine Harmon

     
  
Babbitt
—Sinclair Lewis

     
  
Between Silk and Cyanide
—Leo Marks

     
  
Bartleby the Scrivener
—Herman Melville