humorless, either, although of necessity the humor tends to be a little bleak. When Coco is asked, as part of her application, for an essay entitled âWhyI Want To Live in Public Housing,â she writes simply, âBecause Iâm homeless.â And a description of the office Christmas party thrown by Jessicaâs major-duty drug-dealing boyfriend Boy George is hilarious, if youâre able to laugh at the magnitude of your misapprehensions concerning the wages of sin. (The party took place on a yacht. There were 121 guests, who ate steak tartare and drank twelve grandâs worth of Moët, and who won Hawaiian trips and Mitsubishis in the raffle. The Jungle Brothers, Loose Touch, and Big Daddy Kane performed. Are you listening, Spree?)
George is banged up in the end, of course, so mostly Jessica and Coco are eating rice and beans, when theyâre eating at all, and moving from one rat-infested dump to the next. Luckily we donât have poverty in England, because Tony Blair eradicated it shortly after he came to power in 1997. (Note to Guardian reviewerâthat was a joke.) But American people should really read this book. Thatâs âshouldâ as in, Itâs really good, and âshouldâ as in, Youâre a bad person if you donât.
I warned you that this was going to be a nonfiction month. I started three novels, all of them warmly recommended by friends or newspapers, and I came to the rather brilliant conclusion that not one of them was David Copperfield , the last novel I read, and the completion of which has left a devastating hole in my life. So it seemed like a good time to find out about Coco and Jessica and Bobby Fischer, real people I knew nothing about. Bobby Fischer Goes to War isnât the most elegantly written book Iâve ever read, but the story it tells is so compellingâso hilarious, so nutty, so resonantâthat you forgive it its prose trespasses.
When Fischer played Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 I was fifteen, and not yet worrying about whether anyone was pregnant. You heard about chess all the time that summer, on the TV and on the radio, and I presumed that you always heard about chess in the year of a World Chess Championship, that Iâd simply been too young to notice the previous tournament. That happened all the time when you were in your early teens: things that only rolled around every few years, like elections and Olympics, suddenly assumed a magnitude youâd never known they possessed, simply because you were more media-aware. The truth in this case was, of course, that no one had ever talked about chess before, and no one ever would again, really. Everyone was talking about Fischer: Fischerand his refusal to play, Fischer and his demands for more money (he just about bankrupted an entire country by demanding a bigger and bigger chunk of the purse, and then refusing to allow the Icelanders to recoup it through TV and film coverage), Fischer and his forfeit of the second game, Fischer and his absence from the opening ceremony⦠You could make an absolutely gripping film of Reykjavik â72 which would end with the very first move of the very first match, and which would be about pretty much everything.
Tony Hoagland is the sort of poet you dream of finding but almost never do. His work is relaxed, deceptively easy on the eye and ear, and it has jokes and unexpected little bursts of melancholic resonance. Plus, I pretty much understand all of it, and yet itâs cleverâas you almost certainly know, contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century. If something doesnât give you even a shot at comprehension in the first couple of readings, then my motto is âFuck it,â but I never swore once. They can use that as a blurb, if they want. They should. Who wouldnât buy a poetry book that said âI
George is banged up in the end, of course, so mostly Jessica and Coco are eating rice and beans, when theyâre eating at all, and moving from one rat-infested dump to the next. Luckily we donât have poverty in England, because Tony Blair eradicated it shortly after he came to power in 1997. (Note to Guardian reviewerâthat was a joke.) But American people should really read this book. Thatâs âshouldâ as in, Itâs really good, and âshouldâ as in, Youâre a bad person if you donât.
I warned you that this was going to be a nonfiction month. I started three novels, all of them warmly recommended by friends or newspapers, and I came to the rather brilliant conclusion that not one of them was David Copperfield , the last novel I read, and the completion of which has left a devastating hole in my life. So it seemed like a good time to find out about Coco and Jessica and Bobby Fischer, real people I knew nothing about. Bobby Fischer Goes to War isnât the most elegantly written book Iâve ever read, but the story it tells is so compellingâso hilarious, so nutty, so resonantâthat you forgive it its prose trespasses.
When Fischer played Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 I was fifteen, and not yet worrying about whether anyone was pregnant. You heard about chess all the time that summer, on the TV and on the radio, and I presumed that you always heard about chess in the year of a World Chess Championship, that Iâd simply been too young to notice the previous tournament. That happened all the time when you were in your early teens: things that only rolled around every few years, like elections and Olympics, suddenly assumed a magnitude youâd never known they possessed, simply because you were more media-aware. The truth in this case was, of course, that no one had ever talked about chess before, and no one ever would again, really. Everyone was talking about Fischer: Fischerand his refusal to play, Fischer and his demands for more money (he just about bankrupted an entire country by demanding a bigger and bigger chunk of the purse, and then refusing to allow the Icelanders to recoup it through TV and film coverage), Fischer and his forfeit of the second game, Fischer and his absence from the opening ceremony⦠You could make an absolutely gripping film of Reykjavik â72 which would end with the very first move of the very first match, and which would be about pretty much everything.
Tony Hoagland is the sort of poet you dream of finding but almost never do. His work is relaxed, deceptively easy on the eye and ear, and it has jokes and unexpected little bursts of melancholic resonance. Plus, I pretty much understand all of it, and yet itâs cleverâas you almost certainly know, contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century. If something doesnât give you even a shot at comprehension in the first couple of readings, then my motto is âFuck it,â but I never swore once. They can use that as a blurb, if they want. They should. Who wouldnât buy a poetry book that said âI
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