Zoo Time Read Online Free PDF

you know what I am expected to require of you?’ he suddenly looked me in the eyes and said. ‘That you twit.’
    ‘Twit?’
    ‘Twit, tweet, I don’t know.’
    ‘And why are you expected to require it of me?’
    ‘So that you can do our business for us. So that you can connect to your readers, tell them what you’re writing, tell them where you’re going to be speaking, tell them what you’re reading, tell them what you’re fucking eating.’
    ‘Spotted dick.’
    He didn’t find that funny. ‘So why particularly me?’ I asked.
    ‘Not just you. Everybody. Can you imagine asking Salinger to twit?’
    ‘Salinger’s dead.’
    ‘No bloody wonder.’
    He fell silent again, and then asked me if I used the Internet. Used the Internet – you had to love Merton, he was so out of touch.
    ‘A bit.’
    ‘Do you blag?’
    ‘Blog? No.’
    ‘Do you read other people’s blags?’
    ‘Blogs. Sometimes.’
    ‘The blog’s the end of everything,’ he said.
    The word sounded uncouth on his lips. It was like hearing the Archbishop of Canterbury talking about taking a Zumba class. The blog belongs to yesterday, I wanted to tell him. If you’re going to blame anything you should be blaming myBlank and shitFace and whatever else was persuading the unRead to believe everybody had a right to an opinion. But it was rare to hear Merton open up and I didn’t want to silence him almost before he’d begun. ‘Tell me more,’ I said.
    He looked around the room as though he’d never seen it before. ‘What’s there to tell? Novels are history, not because no one can write them but because no one can read them. It’s a different idea of language. Go on the Internet and all you’ll find is –’ He searched for a word.
    I offered him expostulation. A favourite word of mine. It evoked the harrumphings of bigoted old men. Only now it was the bigoted young who were harrumphing.
    Merton seemed happy with it, in so far as he could be said to seem happy with anything. ‘Novelists find their way to meaning,’ he said. I nodded furiously. Wasn’t I still finding my way to mine? But he was speaking to the unseen forces, not to me. ‘The blog generation knows what it wants to say before it says it,’ he continued. ‘They think writing is opinionated statement. In the end that is all they will come to expect from words. My own children ask me what I mean all the time. They want to know what I’m getting at. They ask the point of the books I publish. What are they on about, Dad? Tell us so we don’t have to read them. I can’t come up with an answer. What’s Crime and Punishment on about?’
    ‘Crime and punishment.’
    He didn’t appreciate my facetiousness. ‘So you think their question is fair? You think a novel is no more than its synopsis?’
    ‘You know I don’t.’
    ‘Do you have children? I can’t remember.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You’re lucky in that case. You don’t have to see how badly educated they are. You don’t have to see them come home from school having read a scene from King Lear – the one in the rain, it’s not considered necessary to read about him when he’s dry – and thinking they know the play. It’s about this old fart, Dad.’
    ‘So what do you say to them?’
    ‘I say literature is not about things.’
    ‘And what do they say?’
    ‘That I’m an old fart.’
    These were more words than I’d heard Merton utter in a decade. But they were to be his last. ‘Mmm,’ he said when he saw the bill.
    Later that afternoon, without twitting about it to anyone, he did what he had to do.
     
    If you discounted the book-stealing, the mouth-writing and the hair-pulling, I was in better shape than many. I was certainly in better shape than poor Merton. I still dressed well, couture being in my veins, bought expensive shoes and belts, and tucked my shirt into my trousers. (Slovenly dresser, slovenly writer.) But by no stretch of the imagination could I have been said to look like someone who was