I must
admit to several character weaknesses in my personality make-up. Call me
squeamish, but I don’t like confrontations. I go out of my way to avoid
confrontations. I am also a creature given to contradictory, usually
short-lived but very genuine, enthusiasms. I have a near-compulsive need to
rationalise; I try with the best of my abilities to put myself in others’
shoes; I try to understand; I attempt to find reasons when there are no reasons
to be found; and then I try to convince myself, against my better judgment,
that what is clearly unpalatable will be palatable if only I tried harder. The
result, more often than not, is I end up making decisions I regret even as I am
making them; I agree to do things I know I will hate even as I agree; and I
accept things every rational part of my brain is screaming I should be treating
with the same suspicion with which Prince Philip approaches the extended hand
of an Australian aboriginal.
I have been
a member of a book group for more than a year. Don’t ask me why I agreed to
join the group (see the paragraph above). Essentially I could not say no when a
friend of a friend invited me to join. To be honest I was also flattered—like when
an unattractive teenager with spotty face and dandruff on his collar is asked
out by the attractive girl in the class, with bouncy bust, he is secretly
lusting after—when he said he and his book-mates would be very honoured if
someone like me who was such a voracious reader joined the group. I got a bit
carried away. I thought that in these monthly gatherings to discuss literary
fiction I—the voracious reader—would dazzle the other members with my searing
comments, mordant wit and incisive insights.
A year down
the line, I am regretting the decision. It was a mistake. It was never going to
work. When a group comprises more than half a dozen individuals, it is
impossible that they will have the same taste in reading. Now, you might say
that that’s a good thing. People, in such groups, will suggest different
genres, and you’d read books you’d otherwise not have read.
That is
exactly my problem. I have been reading books in the past one year I’d
otherwise have not read, and, reading them has confirmed to me that I was right
in avoiding them all these years.
Then there
are the members of the book-groups.
A group
member relishes in describing himself as a “working class boy from East End of
London”. I don’t know what he does for living (he works for some charity, I
think), but he gives autumn parties, books tickets for the first day of the
Ashes tests, drinks white chateauneuf du
pape (and is a member of a frigging book club). But he refuses to consider
himself even an honorary member of the middle classes. The man does not strike
me as mentally privileged and his command over English is shaky at best. Probably for these reasons he claims to hate middle
brow fiction. Which basically is any novel that is literary and does not have gruesome
murders in it. Sometime ago we discussed The Good Soldier. The man read the
first ten pages of the novel and apparently lost the will to live. He could not
carry on. It’s a matter of regret that he did not kill himself. That’s what he does with any novel that
challenges his attention span, and announces in the meetings that the novel was
full of “middle class nonsense” and he simply could not read such tosh. He gets
on my nerves. He is forever sugegsting novels of writers like Carl Hiaasen and
George Pelecanos. A couple of months ago, probably just to have a break from
his moaning, the group agreed to read a George Pelecanos novel called The
Cut. Words fail me to describe how awful the novel was. It really had
no redeeming features. It was an easy read, but, since I am not a fast reader,
I still wasted four days finishing it. When the group met, it turned out that
the majority had not liked it. A few members laid into the novel, and I
actually found myself arguing that the novel was not all that bad; that it had
some witty dialogues; and that there was a semi-believable depiction of the
soft underbelly of Washington D.C., the city in which apparently majority of
Pelecanos’s novels are set.
This brings
me to my second problem. In the past one year I have not managed to dazzle the
group with my searing observations and mordant wit. Indeed I have not managed
to say much at all in the meetings. There are a few reasons for this. It seems
to me that for some group members the ability to listen to others is about as
useful, in this day and age, as the ability to make fire with twigs. It is not
necessary; they can do without it. As soon as the discussion opens these guys
launch into their monologues as if a yearlong curfew on speaking has just been
lifted for a few hours. They are fluent, I will grant them that. (Do they
rehearse in front of the mirror what they are going to say in the meeting?
Surely, even these losers couldn’t be that sad.) Some of them have done
creative writing courses and, even though they have not got round to publish even
a short story, they use lots of technical words with the relish of a
gynaecologist explaining hysterectomy procedure to his patient. It is not that
they don’t have a point. Unlike the “working class boy from East End of London”
these guys have an interest in reading. (The “working class boy”, I suspect, comes
mainly to eat, and also because he has probably heard that sophisticated,
cultured people join book groups, although he would soon shoot himself between
the eyes than accept that he wants to be cultured and sophisticated.) But they
talk too much, probably working on the principle that it is a sin to be precise
and concise when you can waste five times the required number of words. They
are tireless and tiresome. As they drone on I try to keep myself awake, as I
stab at my pepperoni pizza, by thinking imaginative questions such as why
only fingernails continue to grow while the rest of the body stops, and whether
the plump waitress sashaying seductively between tables (although for all that sashaying
not great in the tits department) and wearing improbably tight trousers would burst
an artery in her pelvis. On the rare occasion when I manage to get a word in
edgeways, I, to my disgust, find myself saying mealy mouthed wishy-washy things
which are vaguely complimentary. Even when I have not liked the novel (which
has been the case 75% of the time so far) I avoid criticising it harshly. Why
do I do it? Probably for the same reason I do not make a fuss when waiters
are rude in restaurants, or when a young mother demands to get ahead of me in
the queue at the till because her child is cranky, or why I don’t ask the old
biddy, who happens to sit next to me on the bus and who attaches great
importance to telling me her entire life history, to shut up. I don’t want to
hurt people’s feelings. I want to be nice.
If I were a
man of metal, if I had the character strength of an iron skillet, if I were
not obsessed with offering the world my unwavering amiability and appearing
relentlessly reasonable, I would tell the other group members that I was sorry
to be the bearer of a bad news but it would be grossly irresponsible to suggest
anything different; that the book group meetings were so dire that I would
rather have my teeth slowly extracted (without local anaesthesia) by a chatty
dentist who has had lots of onions for lunch than spending an evening in a
restaurant the white tiles of which put you in the mind of a urinal, in the
company of people in comparison with whom meetings of Dagenham city
council were like a gallon of coffee.
