Book of the Day: "Outside of a Dog A Bibliomemoir" By Rick Gekoski Constable, 278pp £14.99
THIS IS a curious book. Rick Gekoski, a book dealer and former academic, now is his 60s, has described his life through the 25 books that have most influenced him.
One anticipates a cosy read with an avuncular American pulling down leatherbound tomes by the fireside and familiarly enthusing on their contents. But this is a much more unpredictable encounter and deals with some dark domestic material.
Gekoski is an obsessional, not to say self-obsessional, character who, as he says himself, “is likely to blurt out inappropriate things about others and is guided almost entirely by the pleasure principle”. He has a needy, even greedy, attitude to the world and it is through books that he has tried to put some meaning on it all. His books are chosen chronologically so that in his early years, in Long Island, New York, it is works by Dr Seuss and JD Salinger, whereas during college years it is the poems of Yeats, with whom he tries (unsuccessfully) to woo women. He later rejects much of Yeats’s Celtic codology, as he sees it, and later again redeems him. One of the pleasures of Gekoski’s account is how his attitude to these authors changes, admitting all the while that they are having far too much influence on him.
Wooing is a large part of his hungry approach and Gekoski gives us the ups and downs of relationships and marriages and, later, some intense periods of therapy. Impressed by RD Laing's Divided Self, he meets Laing and enrols in his programme but immediately challenges its precepts and the unquestioning attitude to Laing's theories.
Gekoski is an awkward character who likes to rock the boat. Not surprisingly he departs the teaching of English after it becomes overrun by theory. There is a wonderful description of the joyless and plainly wrongheaded disciples of fatuous postmodernism spouting their new theories. By contrast, Gekoski extols among his favourite authors DH Lawrence, a much- maligned writer in our glib, irony-crippled age. But Gekoski is a reader’s reader and his enthusiasm is palpable.
He is also an ambitious reader, wading through intellectuals such as Matthew Arnold and FR Leavis but also finding time to gush enthusiastically about Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
This child-like enthusiasm for unconventional experience is endearing but it is also irritating, and there are some po-faced musings about Freud, childhood and sexuality, which make for uncomfortable reading. It is all quite American and self-absorbed. By contrast, the sudden separation of his parents, the toll this takes on his mother and her painful death are dealt with almost fleetingly. “Life is shit,” she declares on her deathbed, but Gekoski does not explore this and quickly returns to his books, his drug taking and his quest for knowledge, especially self-knowledge.
Having said that, you don't know where he's going next. He becomes a book dealer, buying manuscripts off that old fraud, Graham Greene, and visiting Moscow to look for the lost archive of Cambridge spy Kim Philby. He also writes his own book, Staying Up, about (of all things) Coventry City football club.
This is an exasperating read at times but it is utterly compelling, and certainly more interesting than most of the books published this autumn. Or indeed some of the books he mentions himself. God bless his honesty.
Eamon Delaney's next book is Breaking the Mould – A story of Art and Ireland, which will be published this autumn by New Island