BOOKS READ:
- How I Live Now—Meg Rosoff
- Liars and Saints—Maile Meloy
- Through a Glass Darkly: Life of Patrick Hamilton—Nigel Jones
- Father and Son—Edmund Gosse
- The Siege of Pleasure—Patrick Hamilton
- So Many Books—Gabriel Zaid
BOOKS BOUGHT:
- Chekov: A Life in Letters
- Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters
- The Letters of Kingsley Amis
- Soldiers of Salamis—Javier Cercas
- Timoleon Vieta Come Home—Dan Rhodes
- The Wisdom of Crowds—James Surowiecki
- Liars and Saints—Maile Meloy
- Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall—Anna Funder
- Seven Types of Ambiguity—Elliot Perlman
Sex with cousins: are you for or against? I only ask because the first two books I read this month, Maile Meloy’s Liars and Saints and Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, answer the question with a resounding affirmative. (It’s a long story, but in Liars and Saints, the couple in question is under the impression that they’re actually uncle and niece, rather than cousins—and even that doesn’t stop ’em! Crikey!) People are always plighting their troth to and/or screwing their cousins in Hardy and Austen, but I’d always presumed that this was because of no watercoolers, or speed-dating, or college dances; what is so dispiriting about Liars and Saints and How I Live Now is that they are set in the present, or even in the near-future, in the case of the latter book. No offense to my cousins—or, indeed, to Believer readers who prefer to keep things in the family—but is that really all we have to look forward to?
I know that when it comes to subconscious sexual deviation there’s no such thing as coincidence, but I swear I haven’t been scouring the bookshops for novels about the acceptable face of incest. I picked up Liars and Saints because it’s been blurbed by both Helen Fielding and Philip Roth, and though I enjoyed the book, that conjunction set up an expectation that couldn’t ever be fulfilled: sometimes blurbs can be too successful. I was hoping for something bubbly and yet achingly world-weary, something diverting and yet full of lacerating and unforgettable insights about the human condition, something that was fun while being at the same time no fun at all, in a bracing sort of a way, something that cheered me up while making me want to hang myself. In short, I wanted Roth and Fielding to have cowritten the book, and poor Maile Meloy couldn’t deliver. Liars and Saints is a fresh, sweet-natured first novel, but it’s no Nathan Zuckerman’s...
You have reached your article limit
Sign up for a digital subscription and continue reading all new issues, plus our entire archives, for just $1.50/month.
Already a subscriber? Sign in
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.
