Ten Years in the Tub (45 page)

Our host, meanwhile, chose Anne Tyler's
The Amateur Marriage
, and both the choice and the novel itself made me very happy. Anne Tyler is the person who first made me want to write: I picked up
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
in a bookshop, started to read it there and then, bought it, took it home, finished it, and suddenly I had an ambition, for about the first time in my life. I was worried that
The Amateur Marriage
was going to be a little schematic: Tyler tells the story of a relationship over the decades, and the early part of the book is perhaps too tidy. In the '50s, the couple are living out America's postwar suburban dream, in the '60s they're on the receiving end of the countercultural revolution, and so on. But the cumulative details of the marriage eventually sprawl all over the novel's straight, tight lines as if Tyler were creating a garden; as it turns out, in those first chapters, she's saying, “Just wait for spring—I know what I'm doing.” And she does, of course. Before too long,
The Amateur Marriage
is teeming with life and artfully created mess, and when it's all over, you mourn both the passing of Tyler's creation and the approaching end of her characters' lives.

My ongoing disciplinary troubles with the Polysyllabic Spree, the four hundred and thirty white-robed and utterly psychotic young men and women who control both the
Believer
and the minds of everyone who contributes to it, mean that I have to cram two months' worth of reading into one column. (I no longer have any sense of where I'm going wrong, by the way. I've given up. I think I may have passed on some admittedly baseless gossip about the Gawain poet at the monthly editorial conference, and it didn't go down well, but who knows, really?) So, in brief: Jeremy Lewis's biography of Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, is a tremendous piece of social history, which I have already written about in
Time Out
. (It was the same deal as with
Spies
—I recommend someone
else's book, this time in print, and everyone rushes out to buy mine. See how it works? You've got to hand it to the people who think this stuff up.) And Walter Mosley's
Little Scarlett
comprehensively rubbishes yet another theory this column has previously and unwisely expounded—that crime novels in a series are always inferior to what I believe the trade calls “stand-alones.” Easy Rawlins is one of probably scores of exceptions to the rule, possibly because one of Mosley's aims in the Rawlins books is to write about race in twentieth-century America.
Little Scarlett
is set in L.A. during the Watts riots of 1965, and you never get the sense that you're whiling away the time; the stakes are high, and both detective and book demonstrate a moral seriousness that you don't find in many literary novels, never mind generic thrillers.

Seth Mnookin is yet another member of Violet Incredible's literary set. So those of us who pretend we still know her since she went all Hollywood animated have dutifully read his book about Jayson Blair and the
New York Times
, even though the subject has nothing to do with us, for fear that we'll be cast into the darkness, far away from the warm glow of celebrity. Luckily, Mnookin's book is completely riveting: I doubt I'll read much else about U.S. newspaper culture, so it's just as well that this one is definitive. Mnookin's thoroughness—he explains with clarity and rigor how Blair and the
NYT
was an accident waiting to happen—could have resulted in desiccation, but it's actually pretty juicy in all the right places. None of the outrage Blair caused makes much sense to us in England—you can make up whatever you want here, and you'll never hear from a fact-checker or even an editor—so reading
Hard News
was like reading an Austen novel. You have to understand the context, the parameters of decency in an alien environment, to make any sense of it.

So I'm off on a book tour of the U.S. now, and I'm thinking of taking
Barnaby Rudge
with me. It'll last me the entire three weeks, and it's about the Gordon riots, apparently. I'll bet you can't wait for the next column.

September 2005

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
The Diary of a Country Priest
—Georges Bernanos

     
  
A Complicated Kindness
—Miriam Toews

     
  
Blood Done Sign My Name
—Timothy B. Tyson

     
  
Over Tumbled Graves
—Jess Walter

     
  
Becoming Strangers
—Louise Dean

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Citizen Vince
—Jess Walter

     
  
A Complicated Kindness
—Miriam Toews