Housekeeping? A Visit to Labyrinth; Quality Time with Nick Hornby

This is not about Marilynne Robinson, so if that’s what you’re looking for, sorry.

Recently I ambled into Labyrinth Books, its beautiful location in beautiful downtown New Haven, not looking for anything in particular, but just to peruse shelves. Nothing at the public library had tempted me, and I thought maybe if I looked at bookshelves somewhere else I’d be struck by inspiration.
I was. I suddenly remembered that last year came out a biography of Mrs. Beeton, author of the first major household manual written in English. I couldn’t remember the title or who wrote it but I knew this was a book I’d want to read. Did Labyrinth have a copy on their shelves? No; but they told me that the book would be coming out in paperback in May, so if I would be a good patient little girl, I could read it for much less money in a few months. I accepted this proposal cheerfully and went back to browse bookshelves.
I considered the new Patricia Marx novel. I’d like to read this, actually, but I’m reluctant to pay real money for the honor. I’m not sure if I’ll like it enough to justify the money, especially as my income these days is, shall we say, erratic. And it was never put me in a particularly high tax bracket anyhow. Spending $25 on a book I wasn’t sure about seemed folly. (I would have spent the money on Mrs. Beeton, though. A biography of a woman who wrote about housekeeping – I’ll pay for that.)
I moved back through their fiction section. Labyrinth’s fiction section is actually a little eccentric; it includes not only novels but books in other categories that, in other stores, would be in different sections entirely. Labyrinth doesn’t have a mystery section, for example, though they have a small selection of mysteries (tony ones, or classics; you can, of course, buy a copy of Gaudy Night there, because what academic bookstore won’t sell you a copy of Gaudy Night? A really shitty one, that’s what kind). They don’t seem to have a section for essays and letters – which frustrates me – but instead toss their occasional title in that category into fiction. Hence, it was in fiction that I stumbled on a Nick Hornby book that I’d forgotten about, a book of essays. It’s another collection of his columns from The Believer – those essays where he makes a list of “Books Bought” and compares it to his list of “Books Read” in any given month. I’d read the first one, The Polysyllabic Spree, when I was the buyer at the Bookstore That I Shan’t Name in this essay; I’d enjoyed it but not enough to buy it. I did think it was a clever conceit though. We all know that one acquires books on a regular basis (if one’s the sort of person who acquires books at all, that is) but one’s system of actually reading them is dramatically different from how one reads them. If I buy, say, three books at a bookstore in December, you can bet that by the following December I’ll have read two of them – one of them right away, the next one probably within the following six months – and the third one may never be read at all. (Not that this indicates a lack of love, affection, or interest in the third book. It’s just that life takes one’s reading interests in weird directions sometimes. Or maybe I just bought that third book for the dust jacket, anyhow, and never intended to crack it at all. I have a book I bought only for the fact of its authors’ names and its title – the book itself is crap, but I can’t get rid of it because the names and title are hilarious. It’s by a married couple named Breedlove and it’s called, as I recall, Swap Club. It’s about free love. You have to keep a book like that, it’s too good. I have occasionally considered giving it away as a wedding gift but I’ve yet to meet the right couple, perhaps because I run in fairly boring circles. Ah, well.)
Anyway, Hornby’s new collection has a title that jumped out at me. It probably doesn’t mention Mrs. Beeton at all but I felt it was an entirely justified substitute for Hughes’ biography of that grand woman: the title of Hornby’s book is Housekeeping vs. the Dirt.
Incidentally, he does discuss Marilynne Robinson, a little… but he talks about Gilead, not her first novel Housekeeping*.

*I take this back. If I’d read the whole book before I wrote this, I’d’ve seen that, in fact, on
p. 95 he has a chapter in which he talks about reading Housekeeping. So I was full of shit, but it wasn’t with malicious intent. Sorry.