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

works… poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.” Dickens’s loyal friend John Forster admits that it “will never rank with his higher efforts.” In other words, everyone knew it was a clunker except me—and even I knew, deep down, given that my first reading had been so arduous. And now, presumably, I have to write an introduction explaining why it’s so great. What’s great is the fifth chapter, an extended piece of comic writing that’s as good as anything I’ve ever read by him. (If you have a copy lying about, start it and end it there, as if it were a Wodehouse short story.) What’s not so great about it is not so easy to convey, because so much of it relates—yes—to length, to the plot’s knotty overcomplications, stretched over hundreds and hundreds of pages. “Although I have not been wanting in industry, I have been wanting in invention,” Dickens wrote to Forster sadly, after the first couple of parts had already been published in magazine form, and, as a summation of what’s wrong with the book as a whole, that confession is hard to beat. It’s interesting, I think, that nothing in Our Mutual Friend has wandered out of the pages of the novel and into our lives. There’s no Artful Dodger, Uriah Heep, or Micawber, no Scrooge, no Gradgrind, no “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” no Miss Havisham, no Jarndyce v. Jarndyce . The closest we get is a minor character saying, apropos of another character’s gift for storytelling, that “he do the Police in different voices”—but Dickens needed a little help from Eliot for that particular stab at immortality. As far as I can tell, the novel has recovered from its poor reception, to the extent that it has become one of Dickens’s most studied books, but that, I’m afraid, is no testament to its worth: it has endless themes and images and things to say about greed and poverty and money—in other words, endless material for essays—but none of that makes it any easier toget through. He’ll be back in my life soon enough, but next time I might go for early Dickens, rather than late.
    It now seems a very long time ago that I read Meg Wolitzer’s forthcoming novel, The Uncoupling , and Colum McCann’s National Book Award winner, Let the Great World Spin , and trying to think about them now is like trying to look over a very high wall into somebody’s back garden. I know I enjoyed them, and they both seemed to slip by in a flash, but Dickens stomped his oversize boots all over them. I’m hoping that eventually they will spring back up in my mind, undamaged, like grass. McCann’s novel, as many of you probably know, is set in New York City in August 1974, the summer that Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers on a tightrope. Underneath him, and all touched in some way by Petit’s act of inspired insanity, lives McCann’s cast of priests and lawyers, prostitutes and grieving mothers. It’s a rich, warm, deeply felt and imagined book, destined, I think, to be loved for a long time. Regrettably, however, McCann makes a very small mistake relating to popular music toward the beginning, and, as has happened so many times before, I spent way too long muttering at both the novel and the author. I must stress, once again—because this has come up before—that my inability to forgive negligible errors of this kind is a disfiguring disease, and I am determined to find a cure for it; I mention it here merely to explain why a book I liked a lot has not become a book that I have bought over and over again, to press on anybody who happens to be passing by. And it would be unforgivably small-minded to go into it… Ach. Donovan wasn’t an Irish folk singer, OK? He was a Scottish hippie, and I hate myself.
    Meg Wolitzer, like Tom Perrotta, is an author who makes