BOOKS BOUGHT:
- The Beginner’s Goodbye—Anne Tyler
- 36 Arguments for the Existence of God—Rebecca Goldstein
- Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down: How One Generation of British Actors Changed the World—Robert Sellers
BOOKS READ:
- A Giacometti Portrait—James Lord
- The Submission—Amy Waldman
- Grace Williams Says It Loud—Emma Henderson
- Skylark—Dezsö Kosztolányi
I have been writing in these pages for nearly ten years, on and off, so I’m long past the point where I’m worried about repeating myself. I hope you’re long past that point too, if you’ve been here since the beginning. I hope you treat this column as if it were your favorite chocolate bar: you’ve consumed something not just similar but exactly the same in the last few weeks, but you like it, and it’s been a while since the last one, so it’s OK. And if you follow those serving suggestions, you may actually be surprised every now and again, because it’s not as if I say the same things about the same books every month. The ingredients are the same, sure, but at least the column has the virtue of being wildly inconsistent.
As you have probably guessed, I am about to repeat myself. I have said it before, every time Tyler has published a novel in the last decade, and I hope I have many opportunities to say it again: Anne Tyler changed my life. Before I started reading her books, back in the 1980s, I had no idea that novelists were allowed to do what she did, and still does, namely, write with simplicity, intelligence, humor, and heart about domestic life. Many years later, I realized that she had been given permission because she’s a genius, but the blessing and the curse of her gift is that it seems effortless, and as a consequence she makes lots of idiots, this one included, think that they can do it too. It has also, I suspect, led lots of other idiots to underrate her as a writer. Yes, she’s won a Pulitzer, and she frequently gets ecstatic reviews, yet her seriousness and her craft are so user-friendly that she still doesn’t get the credit she deserves. She is a living American great, right up there with anyone you can think of, but her sympathy for her characters, and her determination to find redemption even for the most hopeless of them, sometimes leads to her being patronized by those critics who need writers to make a song and dance about their profundity and their worth.
Tyler has had a career that, I suspect, is unrepeatable. In 1964, when her first novel was published,...
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contributor
contributor
Nick Hornby is the bestselling author of eight novels, including High Fidelity, About a Boy, and, most recently, Just Like You. He has also published several works of nonfiction including his ground-breaking debut, Fever Pitch, and has written numerous award-winning screenplays for film and television including Brooklyn, Wild, and State of the Union.
