Free Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby Page B

on a crowded tube train, and then another, and then another, untilhours and hours pass—is unforgettable, and very, very real.
    In an online interview, Haddon quotes one of his Amazon reviewers, someone who hated his novel, saying “the most worrying thing about the book is that Christopher says he dislikes fiction, and yet the whole book is fiction.” And that, says the author, “puts at least part of the problem in a nutshell.” It doesn’t, I don’t think, because the Amazon reviewer is too dim to put anything in a nutshell. I suspect, in fact, that the Amazon reviewer couldn’t put anything in the boot of his car, let alone a nutshell. (Presumably you couldn’t write a book about someone who couldn’t read, either, or someone who didn’t like paper, because the whole book is paper. Oh, man, I hate Amazon reviewers. Even the nice ones, who say nice things. They’re bastards too.) But Haddon is right if what he’s saying is that picking through a book of this kind for inconsistencies is a mug’s game, and I’m sorry if that’s what I’ve done. The part that made me wince a little seemed more fundamental than an inconsistency, though.
    This comes up again in Patrick Hamilton’s brilliant Hangover Square , where the central character suffers from some kind of schizophrenia. At periodic intervals he kind of blacks out, even though he remains conscious throughout the attacks. (“It was as though a shutter had fallen”; “as though one had blown one’s nose too hard and the outer world had become suddenly dim”; “as though he had been watching a talking film, and all at once the sound-track had failed”—because George Bone cannot properly recall the last attack, he searches for fresh ways to describe each new one.) And of course it doesn’t quite make sense, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing when the attacks occur, except he does, really; and he doesn’t know who anyone is anymore, except he manages to retain just enough information to make Hamilton’s plot work. And it really doesn’t matter, because this book isn’t about schizophrenia. It’s about an exhausted city on the brink of war—it’s set in London at the beginning of 1939—and about shiftless drunken fuckups, and it feels astonishingly contemporary and fresh. You may remember that I wanted to read Hamilton because my current favorite rock-and-roll band is naming an album after one of his books, and if that seems like a piss-poor (and laughably unliterary) reason to dig out a neglected minor classic, well, I’m sorry. But I got there in the end, and I’m glad I did. Thank you, Marah. Oh, and George Bone in schizophrenic modehas a hilarious and unfathomable obsession with a town called Maidenhead, which is where I grew up, and which has been for the most part overlooked, and wisely so, throughout the entire history of the English novel. Bone thinks that when he gets to Maidenhead, everything’s going to be all right. Good luck with that, George!
    I bought Mark Salzman’s True Notebooks a couple of months ago, after an interview with the author in this magazine. I am beginning belatedly to realize that discovering books through reading about them in the Believer , and then writing about them in the Believer —as I have done once or twice before—is a circular process that doesn’t do you any favors. You’d probably like to read about a book you didn’t read about a while back. Anyway, as the interview implied, this is a pretty great book, but, boy is it sad.
    True Notebooks is about Mark Salzman’s gig teaching writing at Central Juvenile Hall in LA, where just about every kid is awaiting trial on a gang-related murder charge. Salzman’s just the right person to attempt a book of this kind. He’s empathetic and compassionate and all that jazz, but he’s no