Ten Years in the Tub (106 page)

Here in Europe, we still love Obama. But right at the beginning of
Game Change
, when Halperin and Heilemann are describing his relationship with Hillary Clinton, there is a line intended to convey how close the two were, once upon a time, but that serves only to make you wonder about politicians as a species. “At one point, Obama gave her a gift: a photograph of him, Michelle, and their two young daughters, Sasha and Malia.” So, hold on… Hillary was Barack's mother? Because if she wasn't, why on earth would he give her a picture of himself and his kids? Would you do that with someone you knew professionally? “Here's a framed picture of me. Put it up anywhere in your house. It doesn't have to be on your mantelpiece. Or put it up in your office, on the half a shelf you have available for photos of your loved ones.” Try it, and see how often you're invited to after-work drinks.

Game Change
isn't the book I thought it would be, perhaps because the nomination race and the presidential campaign were not what they looked like from across the Atlantic. I was expecting a thrilling and inspirational story, full of goodies and baddies, dizzying highs and dispiriting lows; instead, Heilemann and Halperin describe a long, strength-sapping, and bitter trudge to victory. Much of the book is taken up with the inevitability of Clinton's defeat, and her refusal to acknowledge it, while Obama waits with weary impatience. And the fight between Obama and McCain is a nonevent once Sarah Palin joins in and makes the sides uneven. This is not to say that
Game Change
is dull. It isn't, because every page feels like the truth. It's just that the truth isn't as uplifting as you want to believe.

It was the holiday season here in the U.K., which explains the brevity of the Books Read list: my intellectual life is utterly dependent on my children attending school. The holiday season doesn't explain why I didn't pick up any fiction, nor does it explain why I should choose to spend all my available reading time on the unpromising subjects of American politics and cancer cells. I will only regret it if
Game Change
and
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
turn out to be the last two books I ever read, because I don't think they
illustrate the breathtaking range of my literary tastes. They make me look like the kind of nonfiction guy I meet on planes during book tours. “Should I have heard of you? See, I don't read many novels. I like to learn something I didn't know already.” At the time of writing I am halfway through a short and very beautiful YA novel, the completion of which should recomplicate me; meanwhile, you'll have to forgive these pages of the
Believer
temporarily resembling the books section of
Business Traveller
magazine.

Maybe the business travelers know what they're talking about, though, because
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
is riveting, beautifully written, and, yes, educational. I learned stuff. I learned so much stuff that I kept blurting it out to anyone who'd listen. Do you know who Henrietta Lacks was? Have you ever heard of the HeLa cells? Did you know that they can be found in just about any research lab in the world? And so on. I'll tell you, you don't want to be living with me at the moment. I'm even more boring than usual.

Rebecca Skloot's extraordinary book is the story of a dirt-poor black woman who died an agonizing death from cervical cancer in 1951. Just before Henrietta died, however, a surgeon sliced off a piece of her tumor and gave it to a research scientist called George Gey, who had been trying to grow human cells for years. Henrietta's cells, however, grew like kudzu, for reasons that are still not entirely clear to scientists; they grew so fast, so uncontrollably, that when you look up HeLa on Wikipedia, the entry uses the word
contamination
in the first four lines. HeLa is so powerful and fierce and durable, so eager to reproduce itself, that it gets into everything.

After I had read the first three or four chapters, I was a little worried on Skloot's behalf: I thought she was telling the story too quickly. Henrietta's cells were duplicating, her place in medical history was assured… maybe the last couple of hundred pages would turn out to be the first one hundred rehashed and analyzed, and the book would lose its breathtaking opening momentum. But the author knows what she has, and what she has is a gold mine of material dealing with class, race, family, science, and the law in America. In fact,
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
, like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's incredible
Random Family
, is about pretty much everything. (
Random Family
and Skloot's book both took a decade to research and write, perhaps not coincidentally.
I suspect that in both cases, the subject matter grew richer and richer with each year of contemplation.) Skloot tells brief, vivid, and astonishing stories of medical-ethics cases; she follows the cells as they get blasted into space and help find a vaccine for polio; she weaves in the lives of Henrietta's children as they struggle through the decades following their mother's death. They had no idea that she had achieved immortality until the 1970s, because nobody had ever taken the trouble to tell them, or to ask their permission—a courtesy denied Henrietta herself, of course. And while you can go online this very second and buy HeLa cells, the Lacks family has struggled, mostly in vain, for employment, access to health care, and recognition for Henrietta's contribution to science. If I come across a book as good, as gripping, as well constructed, and as surprising as this in the rest of 2011, I will be a happy and grateful man.

Contemporary fiction is OK, but you don't really learn anything from it, do you? It's mostly written by a bunch of arty losers who couldn't be bothered to go out and get a proper job, and who don't know anything about the world anyway. Nonfiction, that's the thing. Or historical fiction, because you know when you're reading it that people have done a whole load of research into nineteenth-century brick-making. Or thrillers, because you can learn a lot of things about high-grade weaponry. My New Year's resolution is to get a job as a, you know, a business guy, and join a business-guy book club. Plus, I'm going to befriend an important politician, a minister or a secretary of state. If any of you ministers or secretaries of state out there subscribe to this magazine and read this column, then facebook me, OK? I am literally holding my breath, so hurry.

May 2011

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
A Visit from the Goon Squad
—Jennifer Egan

     
  
Norwood
—Charles Portis

     
  
Out Stealing Horses
—Per Petterson

     
  
The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America
—Don Lattin

     
  
Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball
—Stefan Kanfer

     
  
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty
—Tony Hoagland

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Marry Me: A Romance
—John Updike