More Baths Less Talking by Nick Hornby

Scientologists tend to be; Bob Hare, the man who devised the eponymous test; and a top CEO whose legendary ruthlessness leads Ronson to suspect that he might tick a few too many boxes. (It is Bob Hare’s contention that psychopaths are all around us, in positions that allow them to exert and abuse their authority.) Like all Ronson’s work, The Psychopath Test is funny, frightening, and provocative: it had never occurred to me, for example, that Scientologists had any kind of an argument for their apparently absurd war on science, but Ronson’s account of the equally absurd experiments and treatments for which respected psychiatrists are responsible gives one pause for thought.
    If you are a subscriber to this magazine, and a regular reader of this column, and you have very little going on in your life, and you’rekind of anal, you may be thinking to yourself, Hey! It’s eight weeks since he last wrote a column, and he’s read exactly four books! There are various explanations and excuses I could give you, but the two most pertinent are as follows:
    (1) I have been cruelly tricked into cofounding a writing center for kids, with a weird shop at the front of it, here in London (and don’t even think about copying this idea in the U.S. unless you want to hear from our lawyers—although why you would want to spend a thousand hours and a million pounds a week doing so I can’t imagine).
    (2) I have spent way too much time watching the Dillon Panthers, the fictional football team at the heart of the brilliant drama series Friday Night Lights . (And yes, I know, I know—I have seen the fourth season. I am being respectful to those who are catching up.)
    Reading time, in other words, has been in short supply, even during the day, and half the reading that has got done is directly related to the above. H. G. Bissinger’s terrific nonfiction book, the source for a movie and then the TV series, is about the Permian Panthers, who represent a high school in Odessa, Texas, and regularly play in front of crowds of twenty thousand—or did, when the book was published in the early ’90s. There is no equivalent of high-school or college football in Europe, for several reasons: there are no comparable sports scholarships, for a start, and, in a country the size of England, it’s quite hard to live more than fifty miles from a pro team. And in any case, because your major sports have turned out to be so uninteresting to the rest of the world, young talent in the U.S. is governable; the young soccer players of London and Manchester no longer compete with each other for a place in a top professional team, but with kids from Africa and Asia and Spain. Over the last several years, Arsenal has routinely played without a single English player in their starting eleven. Our best player is Spanish; one of our brightest hopes for the future is Japanese and currently on loan to a club in Holland. So the idea ofan entire community’s aspirations being embodied in local teenage athletes is weird, but not unappealing.
    The reality, as Bissinger presents it—and he went to live in Odessa for a year, hung out with players and coaching staff and fans, so he knows what he’s talking about—is a lot darker, however. It turns out that there are not as many liberals in small-town Texas as the TV series would have me believe: in Dillon, people are always speaking out against racism, or talking about art, or thinking about great literature. (The adorably nerdy Landry Clarke can quite clearly be seen reading High Fidelity , my first novel, in an episode of the third season. This is almost certainly the greatest achievement of my writing career. And I’m sorry to bring it up, but I had to tell somebody.) In Odessa, Dillon’s real-life counterpart… not so much racism gets confronted, or towering masterpieces of fiction consumed. Bissinger loves his football, and falls in love with the