The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Nick Hornby

  • Convenience Store Woman and Other Books Briefly Noted

    Last night around midnight I finished my nightstand book “All the Lovers in the Night,” the second of three Japanese fiction books I recently picked up. I read it after “Convenience Store Woman.” Next I’ll read “Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.” Meantime coincidentally I heard about “The Second Chance Convenience Store,” by the Korean writer Kim Ho-Yeon, so I added it to the stack on the nightstand.

    I had been about to begin reading again Penelope Fitzgerald or Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Taylor, after “Seascraper” and “In the Cafe of Lost Youth,” both of which followed “The Dissenters.” The last Elizabeth Bowen I read was “Eva Trout.” My reading of course is a tale neither here nor there nor anywhere, but I try not to write book reviews, ever since Jessica commented, “It’s not a book review,” about something I’d written about one of her books, a simple reflection, drawing unexpected connections. But I was happy with that, with her comment. Too many book reviews seem template formatted and start to sound too similar. But blurbs, blurbs are the worst, exaggerated cartoons of reviews. Before “Eva Trout” I’d read “Spring Garden” and “Forbidden Notebook.” I also read, back in May, a book of short stories one of my brothers wrote, titled “Roxy, Reincarnated.”

    But the last book I read, just before deciding on the Japanese trio, was “The Invention of Morel,” by Adolfo Bioy Casares, influential Borges friend and collaborator. I found the Casares book interesting but not suitable for midnight reading, though some may find it precisely written for the middle of the night. Still, I find it’s still with me, its strangeness. And it too is a kind of cartoon, exaggerated, comic book matter. It deals with metaphysics and light and predicts television and movie popularity. Think of the characters as all movie stars, among which you walk, but they don’t see or hear you. Indeed, one should approach such books with a keen reliance on circumspection:

    “The case of the inventor who is duped by his own invention emphasizes our need for circumspection. But I may be generalizing about the peculiarities of one man, moralizing about a characteristic that applies only to Morel” (80).

    Yet here I am duped by my own book reviews, if you can call them that, and Jessica said you cannot call them that, and she is right. Earlier this year I read “All Our Yesterdays” by Natalia Ginzburg, thick blocks of prose, this one, as if she were trying to save paper. And I read Hemingway’s “Across the River and Into the Trees,” which is not as bad as everyone has ever said, but there seems to be fewer sympathetic readers of Hemingway these days, but which I enjoyed nevertheless. Adam Gopnik had revisited back in a February New Yorker the controversial 1950 takedown profile of Hemingway in The New Yorker by Lillian Ross. Gopnik’s article was a piling on. He claims to have uncovered in recently revealed letters the true nature of the Ross and Hemingway relationship and why Hemingway postured he was not offended by the offensive profile. Something like that. Anyway. Gopnik quotes from Ross the section where Hemingway is buying a belt. Really? I first read the Ross piece in the book format that followed the article. It’s a classic, on that I agree with Gopnik, but for different reasons, but I won’t continue to bore you with Gopnik on Hemingway via Ross any further.

    Nick Hornby used to write a short column for the monthly “Believer” magazine called “Stuff I’ve Been Reading.” I subscribed in its early days and saved all the issues, like deluxe paperbacks, the thick paper, the cartoon-like covers, until I’d had enough, after a few years, and carted them down to the corner book box where they went like Pokemon cards at a garage sale. Hornby’s articles contained two sets of books for the month: books he had bought, and books he had read, seldom exactly the same lists. Two books on my night shelf I’ve not read and they’ve shifted to the bottom: “The Colony” and “Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons.” “The Heart in Winter” was a gift, but I couldn’t get into it. I’m waiting for the heart in spring to come out. Eileen Chang’s “Written on Water” I’m still reading, slowly, slowly. And “The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick,” also slowly, on page 76, the next essay titled “Things,” following short, magazine like pieces on Faye Dunaway, Susan Sontag, and Katherine Anne Porter. Slowly, of necessity. I might have mentioned in some previous post I read Salinger’s “Nine Stories” aloud to Susan, except I skipped “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”

    But I started off here wanting to say something about “Convenience Store Woman.” It’s one of the more original books I’ve read this year. But its form is a novella length cartoon, but without drawings. It’s anime without comics. It’s not anti-literary, though it might appear so to some. It’s a first person narrative of a protagonist who must have a manual to live by, and the manual she finds suitable to her needs is the manual of the convenience store where she works. “All the Lovers in the Night” is more literary formally, but it also involves a single woman at odds with family, social expectations, being different, and aging. And where and what and how to work and establish and nurture relations, and who and what to trust as one navigates the busy streets of a lonely life looking for light in the middle of night, a night light.

  • Montaigne: The First Blogger; or, Nick Hornby’s Surprise

    When my monthly Believer finally arrives, one of the first pieces I read is Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading.” Hornby’s polite sarcasm and gentle disdain of the academic suits the Believer’s editorial voice, a voice which, however, aging with success, must now search for ever new ways to seem avant-garde, if not anti-academic, such that now Nick, trying to sustain his pop-culture bias, must pretend that he’s never heard of Montaigne: “I had never read Montaigne before picking up Bakewell’s book. I knew only that he was a sixteenth-century essayist, and that he had therefore willfully chosen not to interest me.”

    Nick distains blogs and amateur opinions – his going off on the Amazon reviewers suggests even an obsession with the problem – yet manages to credit this month “…that some blogs are better than others.” Still, it’s not clear why he must mention blogs in his review of Emily Fox Gordon’s Book of Days personal essays; they are good, he implies, because they are not merely “nicely written, light, amusing, and disposable,” not blogs, where the writing is, apparently, predictably jokey, imprecise, uncomplicated, and unoriginal. But that doesn’t describe blogs at all – some, ok, many, sure, but in the egalitarian atmosphere of the Internet, one must be ready to read cosmopolitan style, at the same table with others. It’s all a bit confusing, but we read on anyway, getting Nick’s point. And his point is this: “In some ways, my commitment to modernity stood me in good stead: those who cling to the cultural touchstones of an orthodox education are frequently smug, lazy, and intellectually timid – after all, someone else has made all their cultural decisions for them. And in any case, if you decide to consume only art made in the twentieth century…you’re going to end up familiar with a lot of good stuff, enough to last you a lifetime.”

    The problem is that this voice is a cul-de-sac for two reasons: one, every age feels the same; and two, all writers make use of what’s been said before.

    Consider, for example, Anthony Hecht’s 1968 “The Dover Bitch”: “So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl / With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them, / And he said to her, ‘Try to be true to me, / And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad / All over, etc., etc.’” The lines growing like branches in the 20th Century sky, the poem is rooted far deeper. First, the reader must travel back 100 years to Arnold’s 1867 “Dover Beach,” where we find the hapless poet pining for what is not: “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” Arnold’s answer for modern man stranded by the receding “Sea of Faith” is “let us be true / To one another!” The reader traveling back another 200 years, to Andrew Marvell’s 1681 “To His Coy Mistress,” will find Arnold’s deeper roots: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.” The theme that threads these poems together is the ancient Carpe Diem, or Seize the Day, or, as Janis Joplin put it, in terms that even Nick Hornby would understand, “Get it while you can.” But it didn’t start with Andrew Marvell, either, for the reader traveling back another 40 years, to Robert Herrick’s 1646 “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” will find the poet still arguing with his girl to “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” for “That age is best which is the first, / When youth and blood are warmer; / But being spent, the worse, and worst / Times still succeed the former.”

    Imagine Nick Horby’s surprise upon discovering that “the postmortem life of Montaigne has been a rich one: he troubled Descartes and Pascal, got himself banned in France (until 1854), captivated and then disappointed the Romantics, inspired Nietzsche and Stefan Zweig, made this column possible.” Yes, not only made it possible, but wrote the first draft; imagine Nick’s surprise upon discovering that Montaigne was the world’s first blogger.