More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby Read Free Book Online Page A

because he hasn’t forgotten about his characters’ toenails and kidneys even as he’s writing about their immortal souls. (That’s just an over-excited figure of speech, by the way, that bit about toenails and kidneys. There are no toenails in Tinkers , that I remember. I don’t want to put anyone off.) Harding was at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and I don’t know whether he was taught by Marilynne Robinson, but if he was, then I would have loved to sit in on their tutorials; Tinkers , in its depth, wisdom, sadness, and lightly worn mysticism, is reminiscent of Robinson’s Housekeeping . (And I’m not suggesting for a moment he ripped her off, because you can’t rip Marilynne Robinson off, unless you too are wise and deep and possessed of a singular and inimitable consciousness.)
    Tinkers is about a dying man called George Crosby; he’s an old man, coming to the end of his natural life, and he’s hallucinating and remembering, failing to prevent the past from leaking into the present. And George’s dying is linked to his father, Howard’s, life, and eventual death. Howard sold household goods off the back of a wagon toward the beginning of the last century—he was a tinker. George repaired clocks. It’s breathtakingly ambitious in its simplicity, but Harding is somehow able, in this novel that runs less thantwo hundred pages, to include the moments on which a life turns, properly imagined moments, moments grounded in the convincing reality of the characters. I was going to say that it’s perhaps not the best book to take on holiday, because who wants to be reminded of his own mortality while he watches his children frolicking in the icy British surf? But then again, who wants to be reminded of his own mortality after he’s wasted a day messing around on the internet instead of writing a very small section of a superfluous novel, or a screenplay that probably won’t get turned into a film? On reflection, the holiday option is probably the better one: when my time comes, I hope that my children frolic before my eyes. I certainly don’t want to see an unedited paragraph of a superfluous novel.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2010
BOOKS BOUGHT:
    Book of Days —Emily Fox Gordon
    The Master —Colm Tóibín
    Nothing to Envy : Ordinary Lives in North Korea —Barbara Demick
    Family Britain, 1951–1957 —David Kynaston
    The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger —Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
BOOKS READ:
    How to Live: Or, a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer —Sarah Bakewell
    The Broken Word —Adam Foulds
    Book of Days —Emily Fox Gordon
    S omething has been happening to me recently—something which, I suspect, is likely to affect a significant and important part of the rest of my life. The grandiose way of describing this shift is to say that I have been slowly making my peace with antiquity; or, to express it in words that more accurately describe what’s going on, I have discovered that some old shit isn’t so bad.
    Hitherto, my cultural blind spots have included the Romantic poets, every single bar of classical music ever written, and just about anything produced before the nineteenth century, with the exception of Shakespeare and a couple of the bloodier, and hence more Tarantinoesque, revenge tragedies. When I was young, I didn’t wantto listen to or read anything that reminded me of the brown and deeply depressing furniture in my grandmother’s house. She didn’t have many books, but those she did own were indeed brown: cheap and old editions of a couple of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, for example, and maybe a couple of hand-me-down books by somebody like Frances Hodgson Burnett. When I ran out of stuff to read during the holidays, I was pointed in the direction of her one bookcase, but I wanted bright Puffin paperbacks, not mildewed old