"Then there are books that are not bad, but also not good enough" - Paul Collins
Careful with the word "clever": there's funny-clever and then there's unfunny-clever. In Sixpence House (2003), a memoir about books, about moving from San Francisco to England, to Hay-on-Wye, a village of books, Paul Collins can loosely be described as clever. That's the kind of voice he primarily establishes, anyway. But I hurry to add, as others perhaps fail to in similar instances, so there's no confusion: he is largely arch or unfunny-clever. In one scene, the writer sees an old saw for sale. He studies the sign, the price crossed out and lowered and crossed out again until on the bottom it finally reads FREE. The seller approaches him and asks if he's interested. Collins replies: "I'm waiting for the price to go down." The acme of unfunny-clever that is followed by, in the curious way the book has of commenting on itself, directly and indirectly, the appropriate response: the seller smokes his pipe.
"Hedley Lodge, it turns out, is run by Benedictine monks of the Belmont Abbey. So if you steal the towels, you're going to hell." It appears that in the margin next to these lines I drew a stoneface smoking a pipe.
"Jennifer was reading a book that bore a blurb from the Times describing it as 'luminous' - and indeed it would be, if you soaked it in kerosene and burned it." No drawing but there might as well be.
It's the kind of humor, encountered page after page, that can be accompanied by a laugh track on a justly forgotten sitcom. You may know a friend, a family member, a neighbor, a coworker who's nice, who makes these sorts of jokes, though probably not with the same frequency. To spare his or her feelings and avoid awkwardness, you smile politely, laugh a little, and move on, together. Someone may do the same for your weaker jokes. A near-invisible kind gesture that helps keep society from crumbling. Sometimes, however, people take the act too far, throw back their heads, ho ho ho, bellypat, wipe away a non-existent tear, creating a starker contrast a moment later when, free to react as they wish, something more than a stoneface, a stinkface, emerges. Pure misery! (Which makes me laugh.)
Back to the book. Collins is better when drawing from his knowledge of obscure, forgotten reading material, which is summarized or quoted throughout. He informs us that a 19th-century travelogue he's a fan of ends with the writer transcribing the sound of himself vomiting. (Whoop, whoop, oh dear, whoop, etc. - for a whole paragraph.) He transcribes sounds throughout too, mostly to amusing effect, though other fillips fare less well from overuse, soon curdling into distracting tics. Also, he finds some genuine mirth by simply observing his daily life as he adjusts to his new home, such as when he runs to answer the phone and his young son anchors himself to his leg for the last ten yards.
Here's Collins on a work that serves as a model for his own: "His book consists of what amount to pleasant musings upon the home, upon books, upon city and country life." He goes on to praise it for putting him to sleep. Sixpence is thoroughly low stakes. It's not revealing, no one is vividly drawn. Nothing pulse-quickening happens as it meanders from one chapter to the next. His insights aren't piercing. Yet for all his attempts at levity, and his obvious passion for reading, his thoughts on the subject lean more toward sadness. He sees countless books no one will ever touch. Books with something but not enough to them to be rediscovered. Burdensome books. The familiar sight of books in boxes abandoned in the street. Books no one wants unloaded on unsuspecting aspiring booksellers. Books that aren't burned in one colossal pyre solely because the flaming pages would blow away. He tries to search the internet for a once acclaimed novelist, queries his old publisher, sends emails to possible relatives, and finds absolutely nothing, not a shred of information about him.
A reader like Collins looks back, goes where many others wouldn't think to, with a spirit of adventure, trying to make sure such a writer isn't completely neglected. In part it's because he counts himself among them: "Someday this book will join you on those dusty shelves, its binding shaken and a little soiled like yours, and we'll all gaze out upon the passing years." I salvage what shouldn't be lost to them: his good readerly conduct. It's a commendable quality one hopes never vanishes.
