Book 803: Sixpence House – Paul Collins

This has been on my Kindle since February 2013 and really it should’ve stayed there. UGH.

I distinctly remember purchasing it because it was about books and specifically takes place in Hay-on-Wye (Wikipedia link), the book lovers Mecca on the boarder of Wales and England where one of the largest book festivals in the world takes place and there are over two dozen bookshops for the fewer than 2,000 full time residents. How could you go wrong, right?

He definitely went wrong and I was bored 90% of the time. Collins spent over 250 pages writing mundane anecdotes loosely strung together about his attempt to move to and buy a house in Hay, a journey he ultimately abandons with an even more trite ending of being told not to ever try being British again by a US Customs and Border Protection agent. yawn.

It started early with this innocuous quote,

But the only danger here is tripping on a piece of broken macadam. (16)

I knew at that point, after looking up macadam, a very specific term for a broken stone that Collins was going to flex his vocabulary and naval gazing the entire novel. And I was not wrong. The stories were very me-me-me and the woes he faced while going through the last stages of publication for his novel thinly guised in his experience in Hay. I mean the seriousness with which he takes himself and his profession I guess is noble, but when you get crap like this,

I suppose every era looks a little foolish to its descendants. This is because the past is the only country where it is still acceptable to mock the natives. But we should not laugh too hard: for soon enough, we shall all live there. (60)

from an author writing in their mid-30s at the beginning of their career . . . ugh. Don’t get me wrong I wrote philosophical shit like that in my journal when I was younger, but those have been (thankfully) shredded or destroyed.

I honestly was thinking this would be more along the lines of Under the Tuscan Sun where we’d learn about the house and the village and the book writing or talking about books would be the icing on the cake, but no it was the other way around. When he wasn’t inserting passages form obscure out-of-print books he stumbled across he was sharing his awkwardly strung together anecdotes. They don’t even view Sixpence House until 75% of the way through the book and by 80% they know they’re not going to buy it so it’s like why did we bother.

This is particularly poignant when he spent the ENTIRE sixteenth chapter whinging about trying to pick a title for his book. I seriously wanted to gauge my eyes out reading that chapter. It took naval gazing to an entirely different level, especially at that point realizing he wasn’t going to really connect the title to the book or the useless journey he dragged his wife and child on. It was just a throwaway title that sounded quaint.

The one thing he did well was capture the British countryside and the ancient-ness of everything.  Not going to lie that second one below really hit home knowing there’s a night club in an old church in Leeds I  would walk by early in the morning after finishing a shift at a night club in the downtown area made me smile and reminisce.

Decay might be the best growth industry left in Wales. The damaged past, artfully reused, is all most of us ever have to work with anyway. (132)

You cannot find a town here that hasn’t either a ruined church, an abandoned priory, or a vicarage long gone to seed or converted into a condo, a bed-and-breakfast, or an art gallery. Such conversions are so common that they hardly elicit notice. (172)

Describing the house, they ultimately didn’t go with, was well done. Maybe he should’ve just done a travelogue rather than try to philosophize about life and writing. It probably would’ve been a more enjoyable read.

Recommendation: Pass. Unless you want to hear a young author philosophize on writing and publishing their first book while simultaneously uprooting their young family on a whim to what could be a really cool place. It just didn’t work for me and if I DNFd books I would’ve done so. Collins did a much better job of writing about the countryside and the setting than he did with any of the people, but that’s not enough to override the extreme naval gazing narcissism that drives the rest of the book.

Opening Line: “I have never noticed the view from the Flatiron Building before. Manhattan, if you tilt your head just right, is a strangely compelling piece of sculpture.”

Closing Line: “‘Don’t worry,’ I promise. ‘I won’t.'” (Not whited out as this is a work of nonfiction.)

Additional Quotes from Sixpence House
“It is hard to know just how many times we have been exposed to a word, a face, an idea, before we have it. The very idea of an originating point for much of anything becomes hard to pin down.” (8)

“Drywall and veneered particleboard do not exactly put you in the presence of the sublime; most building materials today will not age gracefully and were never meant to. They are only meant to be new. Perhaps the ancient brick walls in London weren’t built with much more foresight for their aesthetic future than any structure today; yet by their very nature they succeed perfectly as ruins.” (15)

“To look for a specific book in Hay is a hopeless task; you can only find the books that are looking for you, the ones you didn’t even know to ask for in the first place. You come to Hay so that you can pick up a magazine you’ve never even heard of and read about Leibnitz’s talking hound.” (37)

“Can you imagine, in America, giving away anything used on a game show – a furnishing not made by Broyhill or La-Z-Boy or Ethan Allen? To give away an old bowl that was once covered with dirt? Why, your contestants would pull out their licensed concealed handguns and plug you one in the gut.” (48)

“‘You know about the quangoes here?’ he demands.
‘I thought they were extinct.’
‘Extinct?‘ he explodes in disbelief.
‘The zebras?’
‘Quangoes,’ he roars. ‘You are thinking of quaggas. I am talking about quangoes.’
‘Quangoes.’
‘Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations. The Milk Board, the Welsh Tourist Board, the Forestry Commission . . . all that lot.’ He waves a hand dismissively. ‘They call them nongovernmental, but they’re propped up with tax money. To build luxury hotels in farming and coal towns, that sort of nonsense.'” (63)

“Hay is a town of travelers who stopped; it is where urbanites come to hide from their home cities and from the tentacles of big-city traders and publishers.” (103)

“There is an implicit code that customers rely on. If a book cover has raised lettering, metallic lettering, or raised metallic lettering, then it is telling the reader: Hello. I am an easy-to-read work on espionage, romance, a celebrity, and/or murder. To readers who do not care for such things, this lettering tells them: Hello. I am crap. Such books can use only glossy paper for the jacket; Serious Books can use glossy finish as well, but it is only Serious Books that are allowed to use matte finish.” (111)

“This is because any writer who waits for inspiration is being an ass. Inspiration is achieved in humans by effort, a pumping of thoracic bellows—you have to breathe for yourself. No one will breathe for you.” (113)

“To see any library, any bookstore, any archive, is like seeing a city: you are viewing buildings constructed atop the unknown and unknowable cities that once were and once might have been.” (205)