Authors: Nick Hornby

Ten Years in the Tub (80 page)

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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When you lookâ¦ at them perceptually, you find that your eye ends up suspended in midair, midspace or even midstride: time and space seem to blend in the continuum of your presence. You lose your bearings for a moment. You end up in a totally meditative state.

Well, what if that doesn't happen to you? I mean, it doesn't happen to everyone, right? What are you left with? And it occurred to me that Catholics could make a similar claim about what happens when you receive communion. There's a big difference between the body of Christ and a bit of wafer.

I shall write about Russo's absorbing, painstakingly detailed novel next month, when I've finished it. But I kept muddling up Irwin with Russo's artist character Noonanânot because the art they make is at all similar, but because the journey they take seems so unlikely. Noonan is a small-town no-hoper with a hateful father who grows up to be one of America's most celebrated painters; Irwin was a working-class kid from L.A. who loved cars and girls, went into the army, and then embarked on an extraordinary theoretical journey that ends with the blurring of the space-time continuum. When you read about the two lives simultaneously, one adds credibility to the other.

Louis Sachar's
Holes
is funny, gripping, and sad, a Boy's Own Adventure story rewritten by Kurt Vonnegut. Do you people ever do light reading, or is it all concrete poetry and state-of-the-nation novels? Because if you ever do take any time out, may I make a suggestion? These young-adult novels I've been Hoovering up are not light in the sense that they are disposable or unmemorableâon the contrary, they have all, without exception, been smart, complicated, deeply felt, deeply meant. They are light, however, in the sense that they are not built to resist your interest in them: they want to be read quickly and effortlessly. So instead of reading the ninth book in a detective series, why not knock off a modern classic instead?

P.S. Well, that didn't take long. I have been suspended for one issue. “Willful failure to finish a book,” it says here, “thereby causing distress to a fellow author and failing in your duty to literature and/or criticism.” Ho hum. This has happened so often that it's water off a duck's back. See you in a couple of months.