Ten Years in the Tub Read Online Free PDF Page B

his career to date. I couldn’t, hand on heart, argue that it transcends the genre, and you probably only really need to read it if you have an Arsenal season ticket. And if there is one single Believer reader who is also an Arsenal season ticket holder, I’ll buy you a drink next home game. What the hell—I’ll buy you a car.
    I received How to Breathe Underwater and the Wilkie Collins novel in the same Jiffy envelope, sent to me by a friend at Penguin, who publishes all three of us in the UK; this friend is evangelical about both books, and so I began one, loved it, finished it, and then started the other. Usually, of course, I treat personal book recommendations with the suspicion they deserve. I’ve got enough to read as it is, so my first reaction when someone tells me to read something is to find a way to doubt their credentials, or to try to dredge up a conflicting view from the memory. (Just as stone always blunts scissors, a lukewarm “Oh, it was OK,” always beats a “You have to read this.” It’s less work that way.) But every now and again, the zealous gleam in someone’s eye catches the attention, and anyway Joanna, jaded as she is by her work, doesn’t make loose or unnecessary recommendations. She keeps her powder dry.
    She was right, luckily for her: How to Breathe Underwater is an outstanding collection of stories. Orringer writes about the things that everyone writes about—youth, friendship, death, grief, etc.—but her narrative settings are fresh and wonderfully knotty. So while her themes are as solid and as recognizable as oak trees, the stuff growing on the bark you’ve never seen before. If you wanted to be reductive, “The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones” would collapse neatly into a coming-of-age story, with a conventional two-girls-and-a-guy triangle at its core. But one of the girls comes from a ferociously orthodox Jewish family, and the other one has a mother who’s in the hospital after the loss of a baby, and the boy has this pornographic book stashed away, and the whole thing is so beautifully and complicatedly imagined that you don’t want to boil it down to its essence. “Pilgrims,” the first story in the book, makes you feel panicky and breathless, and is destined, I suspect, to be taught in creative writing classes everywhere. The moment I’d finished I bought myself a first edition, and then another, for a friend’s birthday. It’s that sort of book. I’ll tell you how much I liked it: one paragraph in the story “When She Is Old and I Am Famous” contained the words “gowns,” “pumps,” “diva hairdos,” “pink chiffon,” “silk roses,” “couture,” and “ Vogue ,” and, after the briefest shudder, I read on anyway.
    I’m a couple of hundred pages into No Name , and so far it’s everything I’d hoped it would be. It was sold to me—or given to me free, anyway—as a lost Victorian classic (and I’d never even heard of it), and it really hits the spot: an engrossing, tortuous plot, quirky characters, pathos, the works. If you pick up the Penguin Classics edition, however, don’t read the blurb on the back. It more or less blows the first (fantastic) plot twist, on the grounds that it’s “revealed early on”—but “early on” turns out to be page ninety-six, not, say, page eight. Note to publishers: Some people read nineteenth-century novels for fun, and a lot of them were written to be read that way too.
    I should, perhaps, attempt to explain away the ludicrous number of books bought this month. Most of them were secondhand paperbacks; I bought the Pete Dexter, the Murakami, and The Poet and the Murderer on a Saturday afternoon spent wandering up and down Stoke Newington Church Street with the baby, and I bought Leadville and Master Georgie from a bookstall at a local