Stuff I’ve Been Reading: January 2012

BOOKS BOUGHT:

• The Family Fang—Kevin Wilson
• Letters to Monica—Philip Larkin
• Bury Me Deep—Megan Abbott
• Wild Abandon—Joe Dunthorne
• Brother of the More Famous Jack—Barbara Trapido
• Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN—James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales

BOOKS READ:

• The Family Fang—Kevin Wilson
• Wild Abandon—Joe Dunthorne
• The End of Everything—Megan Abbott
• Bury Me Deep—Megan Abbott
• Your Voice in My Head—Emma Forrest

One of the pleasures of visiting my half brother, who lives in a lovely house in Sussex, not far from the south coast, is that he knows someone who entertains the children by firing whole lemons from a homemade bazooka. He doesn’t fire the lemons at anything, but that’s the point: a piece of waxy yellow fruit shooting up hundreds of feet through a blue sky is one of the best spectacles Mother Nature can offer. (And let’s face it, even then she needed the help of a man-made explosive device.) In Kevin Wilson’s first novel, The Family Fang, Buster Fang becomes badly injured when, during the course of a magazine assignment, he gets his facial features temporarily rearranged by a potato fired from a very similar device. I am pretty sure I would have loved The Family Fang anyway, but sometimes you need this kind of unexpected, almost suspiciously friendly connection to a novel. Buster is blasted by the potato on page 32 of my hardback copy, just at the point where, if you are the kind of person who gives up on books, you might be asking yourself whether you’re going to stick with it. And then, suddenly, like a sign from God, you’re thinking, Hey! That’s Sam’s lemon gun! Except they’re using potatoes! Earlier in my writing career, I contributed reviews regularly to some of the more respectable broadsheet newspapers; now you can see why I gave up. I could never figure out a way of shoehorning the lemon-gun stories into my ­otherwise careful, sober appraisals, and yet sometimes you need them.

I came across The Family Fang as a result of good old-fashioned browsing, an activity that the internet, the ­decline of bookshops, and a ludicrously optimistic book-buying policy (see every previous column in these pages) has rendered almost obsolete. I picked it up because of the great Ann Patchett’s generous and enthusiastic blurb—“The best single-word description would be genius”—and it stayed picked up because, on further investigation, it appeared to be a novel at least partly about art and why we make it, and I love books on that...