Shakespeare Wrote For Money by Nick Hornby

A couple of weeks ago, one of my favorite Tumblr-ers, Laura from 52 Books, made an exciting announcement on her site: McSweeney’s, an incorrigibly eccentric and intelligent independent publishing house founded by Dave Eggers, was having a garage sale. They were selling off their old books, in a range of conditions, for a fraction of their original cost. Being a lover and hoarder of books, I immediately clicked on the link and purchased four: The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and all three volumes of Nick Hornby’s collected Believer columns, “Stuff I’ve Been Reading.”

I can’t recall exactly when I read The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, the first two installments, but I can figure it out with reasonable accuracy. I must have taken the books out of the library because I know nobody else who has read them and I don’t own them (well, didn’t, until I bought them the other day), but I’m a woeful library patron, preferring owning books over borrowing them (which is an addiction and I’m not afraid to admit I have a problem; I have the USPS box full of acquisitions taken from my recently abdicated job to prove it to me), and the only time in the last five years I used the library with anything approaching regularity was when I was living with my grandmother after graduate school and working downtown at a literary agency, a block away from the main branch of the Chicago Public Library. That would put it in the summer of 2007.

Such is the power of memory.

Anyway, back then I had never read any of Hornby’s novels, not even About a Boy or High Fidelity (although I’ve seen both of the movies). And guess what? I still haven’t read any of his novels, not even Slam, his YA attempt of two years ago. But now, as then, I’ve read all of his Believer columns available in paperback, and boy is he hilarious.

I know I first picked up Spree after reading about it on the now sadly defunct 50 Books blog, and Housekeeping followed quite naturally in its wake. They’re slim little volumes, and though they purport to be about reading Hornby shows no compunction in veering off in other directions when the truth of the matter is that he’s been reading a lot less than he’s been doing other stuff, namely watching soccer. He is British, after all. As he mentions in one or another of the first two books, he got some pushback for that from the magazine*, who preferred that he stay focused, but when you run a column with the vague and noncommittal title “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” you’ve got to take what you can get. Eventually, the smartie pantses** at McSweeney’s wisened up and left the poor man alone to ramble about whatever topic he so chose.

Usually, though, he talks about books.

I’m coming to the realization that reviewing Shakespeare Wrote For Money, the last volume in the collection, while brilliant in theory because the books are fun and interesting and deserve being praised on a blog devoted to pop culture because, like, what is Nick Hornby if not a tireless advocate of pop culture’s literary relevance, was kind of a stupid idea. Because, aside from saying that the books are fun and interesting and deserve to be praised, it’s hard to come up with a solid, useful takeaway message. There’s no plot to be dissected or themes to tease out, and to be totally honest, you have to be both a huge reader and an unrepentant literary voyeur (that is, you have a GoodReads account and 56+ lit blogs in your Google Reader, a moi) to really appreciate these books.

Take, for instance, this wry observation about Ali Smith’s The Accidental:

I should own up here and tell you that The Accidental is a literary novel; there’s no point trying to hide this fact. But it’s literary not because the author is attempting to be boring in the hope of getting on to the shortlist of a literary prize (and here in the UK, Smith’s been on just about every shortlist there is) but because she can’t figure out a different way of getting this particular job done, and the novel’s experiments, its shifting points of view, and its playfulness with language seem absolutely necessary.

Now, to really appreciate that statement, you have to not only have the particular love-hate relationship with so-called “literary novels” and literary prizes that comes mainly from taking too many fucking creative writing classes with people who call their “style” “Raymond Carver-esque”, but you have to A.) know who Ali Smith is and ideally B.) have read something the woman has written. Because she is such a strange writer, and by strange I do mean incredibly brilliant and incredibly confusing. My favorite short story of hers involves the passionate, unrequited love a person of indeterminate gender has for a tree. A TREE, people. Best short story ever.***

Basically, these little collections of Hornby’s are book porn. If you love books—or, more accurately, if you love the act of reading, although I can’t for a minute imagine that one could exist without the other—you must read them. Otherwise, just pick up one of Hornby’s novels. I can’t recommend one personally, but I hear How to Be Good is nice.

*It's important to note, though, that this was probably a joke.
** Is “smarty pants” like moose or sheep—same plural as singular—or what? I stand by my rather awkward pluralization, but if anyone has the wherewithal to look it up, I’d be happy to print a correction.
*** “Spring”, to be found in the collection The Other Story and Other Stories because, you know, wordplay.

This entry was posted by OHD, on Sunday, August 02, 2009. You can leave your response.