Sixpence House – Triple Take

Sixpence House by Paul Collins: B+

From the book jacket:
Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countrysideâ€”to move, in fact, to the little cobblestone village of Hay-on-Wye, the “Town of Books,” boasting 1,500 inhabitants… and forty bookstores. Antiquarian bookstores, no less.
Inviting readers into a sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding us through […]

From the book jacket:
Paul Collins and his family abandoned the hills of San Francisco to move to the Welsh countrysideâ€”to move, in fact, to the little cobblestone village of Hay-on-Wye, the “Town of Books,” boasting 1,500 inhabitants… and forty bookstores. Antiquarian bookstores, no less.

Inviting readers into a sanctuary for book lovers, and guiding us through the production of the author’s own first book, Sixpence House is a wonderfully engaging meditation on what books mean to us, and how their meaning can resonate long after they have been abandoned by their public.

Review:
Books, Britain, and buildings are three of my favorite topics, and when one tosses them together in one book, odds are that I’m going to like it. Even if, as in the case of Sixpence House, there is no real plot to speak of. Seriously, this family moves to Wales, tries to buy a house, fails, then moves back to the United States. Despite the title making one think that they’ll be buying and renovating a particular house, that never actually comes to pass.

I couldn’t really get into the book at first, because the style of writing is incredibly tangential. Collins will be relating a story in which he has just gotten off the Tube in London, and will suddenly switch to a description of a rotunda built in San Francisco in 1915. He never really stops doing things like this, but I got used to the side trips and even came to enjoy them.

On booksâ€”Collins very clearly loves them, and delights in quoting passages from obscure publications. I enjoyed all of the excerpts from these forgotten tomes and felt a momentary stirring of desire to hunt for such abandoned treasures myself. He also talks a good deal about the capacity of books to live on far beyond the span of their author, leading to different reflections upon mortality. That’s not a subject I prefer to dwell on, but he handles the topic thoughtfully, and with a practical bent seemingly influenced by the practices of the Brits themselves.

On Britainâ€”More than any other source, Sixpence House has provided me a good idea of what life in Britain can really be like to one coming from an American perspective. Some things are betterâ€”television and print media assume a far greater level of consumer intellect than their American equivalents, for exampleâ€”and some worse, like the lack of right to privacy laws in the UK. My one complaint is that sometimes I couldn’t be sure what was actually true and what was just dry humor. For instance, when I looked up a thoroughly silly-sounding practice called gazumping, I found that it was genuine, but I’m still about 95% sure that a comment about Welsh pronunciation isn’t.

On buildingsâ€”now I understand why some people I have known who tried to move to the UK have ended up returning to America! I could never grasp it before; it seemed such a wonderful place! But it turns out there are no agents to look after the buyer during the sale of a property, no contract to keep all of your work from being for naught, and no requirement for the seller to share information about the property, forcing the seller to pay for an expensive survey for any house in which they might be interested. To an American, this seems crazy!

Collins does an excellent job in describing all of the quaint old buildings around Hay, as well as the village and its denizens. I appreciated that he and his wife wanted a home with a lot of history, but understood completely when they eventually gave up their search after being stymied by outrageous asking prices, weird stipulations about proceeds from land sales, and daunting renovations. My desire to visit the UK is as strong as it ever was, but I’m also left with the impression that I really wouldn’t want to live there. Even if their TV is awesome.

Collins has written several other works of nonfiction, including one called Banvard’s Folly (subtitled Thirteen Tales of People That Didn’t Change the World) that gets mentioned a good bit in this narrative. It seems he also is instrumental in bringing forth some of the lost gems that he loves so much, like English as She is Spoke, a phrasebook written by men who didn’t actually speak English. I hope to read both of these at some point, if the library is successful in acquiring them on my behalf.

Additional reviews of Sixpence House can be found at Triple Take.

J’s Take on Sixpence House by Paul Collins

I can’t remember how Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books caught my attention, but it’s clear why it did. It’s a book about a little town full of used/antiquarian bookstores. And that town is in Wales! It’s Hay-on-Wye, and I’m afraid now any trip to the UK is not only not going to be complete without a trip to the Platform 9 3/4’s sign and an even geekier trip to Cardiff, but now I need to at least spend an hour or two in Hay-on-Wye.

It’s easier to describe this book before you’ve read it. Like, I probably would’ve called it a travelogue, except… for ‘travel’ there’s the assumption that you’re going to a place for a finite amount of time and then going home, or alternatively, traveling on to another place and another in a continental or world tour. But in this book, the author and his wife and small child pack up to sell their home in San Francisco and move to Wales. Without, apparently, a whole lot of research. They supposedly know the UK and Hay-on-Wye in particular, from relatives born there and from past trips, yet they’re surprised that they don’t get a real estate agent because they’re buyers, not sellers? Even I knew the real estate market there was rather goofy. And then they’re also rather surprised when all the cool, old buildings they’re interested in need a lot of upkeep, and they realize they’re not prepared for that. Heckuvan expensive and time-consuming learning experience, if you ask me.

But the book is full of random bits of information, gleaned from old books. Facts, anecdotes, quotes, and just interesting little tidbits. So you really get a sense of this town just from the way he’s written the book. A couple really stood out to me. Right at the start, we learn that the Harry Potter printruns used up most of the publishing industry’s paper for a brief period of time. Logical, amazing, amusing, and something I hadn’t heard before. True? Or just something that should be true?

Because when I finished the book, I wasn’t sure what was true and what wasn’t. Yes, this is a real town, so you might assume names have been changed to protect the innocent, but he doesn’t say this up front. And how do you write about such a small town and mention it by name and still disguise the identities of the people you’re talking about? At the end, he tells us some of the names of people and places are made up. But we don’t know which ones!

There are other parts where I questioned the honesty of what I was being presented. Where there’s a bit of dialogue in which a vital bit of information is shared in an amusing way. Did he really not know that information before that moment? Are the conversations all really that pithy and eccentric? My disbelief has trouble being suspended when I’m supposedly reading a nonfiction book, so my credulity was strained.

Interspersed with talk of the UK, Hay-on-Wye, and books, is mention of his own books. He’s in the middle of the publishing aspects of his first book. We hear about his first reading, sort of. We hear about his proof edits. We also hear about a couple of his novels that weren’t published.

Which leads into a quote I wanted to share.

… that twee little fable that writers like to pass off on gullible readers, that a character can develop a will of his own and “take over a book.” This makes writing sound supernatural and mysterious, like possession by the faeries. The reality tends to involve a spare room, a pirated copy of MS Word, and a table bought on sale at Target. A character can no more take over your novel than an eggplant and a jar of cumin can take over your kitchen.

He’s dead wrong here. Not all novels are written this way, and some are more about plot, setting, or theme than they are about three-dimensional characters, but many are. Once you know a character well enough, you know what they’ll say and do, and what they won’t say and won’t do, even if you need them to for the purposes of the plot. This topic is probably an essay in itself, involving references to psychology and neuroscience and our mental constructions of other people. Suffice it to say that I feel sorry for him that he doesn’t grasp this essential truth, and that it didn’t surprise me to learn that his novels had yet to be published.

At the end of the book, I rather wondered what the whole point of it was. It was like a journey without a destination. You may say the whole point is the journey, but there’s still something unsatisfying about not arriving anywhere at the end of it.

It was an amusing, entertaining read, and made me wish I cared more about old books. Unfortunately, the science fiction genre is relatively new as far as old books go, and I prefer modern fantasies to very old ones, so I have trouble coming up with any topic or author I’d be seeking out in old bookstores in Wales. Honestly, I don’t care to own an old copy of a book I already have a new copy of. It’s still the same book. So if I was seeking anything out, it’d be obscure books. How do you find obscure books of quality?

For the readability and entertainment, I’ll give this three stars. For the ending and the author’s low, for lack of a better word, likeability factor, I’m only giving it three stars.

Sixpence House (Paul Collins)

The Plot
This is a memoir, and more a string of events than a story with a plot. However, the basic premise is that the author, his wife and their toddler decide to give up life in San Francisco in favor of moving to a village in Wales. Here, the lovely country air and the […]

The Plot
This is a memoir, and more a string of events than a story with a plot. However, the basic premise is that the author, his wife and their toddler decide to give up life in San Francisco in favor of moving to a village in Wales. Here, the lovely country air and the peaceful British countryside will provide their child with the perfect setting for growing up.

My Thoughts
The author, Paul, and his wife, Jennifer, are finding life in the big city of San Francisco to be less than ideal for raising a child. So they dispose of their place in California and head to the village of Hay-on-Wye in Wales, where they have vacationed several times in the past. Note that Paul is the American born child of British citizens and as such is considered a British national by that country, so just up and moving there is not as complex as it might be. The action in this book also takes place pre-9/11 (specifically during the year 2000) so all craziness introduced by that incident is not yet in place.

Both Paul and Jennifer appear to be writers, and not employed in such a way that they’re tied to a geographic location. This and Paul’s citizenship status remove the biggest obstacles to indulging in their whim, and so they proceed to Wales. When they arrive, they establish themselves at a B&B and begin looking for a more permanent residence. It does not take them too long to locate an apartment which they can take for a longer period of time and they move in above one of the forty bookshops in the town.

The remainder of the book details their efforts and failure to locate a suitable house to purchase, and their eventual decision to give up and return to the United States.

It’s hard to discuss the book itself without making judgements upon the actions taken by the author and his family, so I’m going to get that out of the way first. I think their plan was poorly thought out and even more poorly executed. Though they had visited the town several times previously, they did not appear to have any real idea about the real estate market in the area and they had only the vaguest of notions about the neighborhood aside from the fact that there were bookstores around. Their search for a house was lackluster at best, as they apparently looked at only three or four houses during their entire effort. And then, when they decided that Hay-on-Wye was not the town for them, instead of looking nearby for a more suitable location, they packed it in and returned to the United States. It was all very odd.

Now, how much of the oddness stems from the way the tale was told, I cannot say. It is entirely possible that there were lengthy conversations and much house hunting which took place off camera and was neither alluded to nor described in any way. In fact, I know there must have been at least a few discussions which were not related to the reader, as we are informed of the family’s imminent return to the U.S. as a sort of aside, in the author’s thoughts as he converses with a resident of the town.

As one might guess from this, the narrative itself is very episodic, jumping from one event to the next and glossing over details which, while not necessary, would give more insight into the people in the book. At many points I felt like the author started a thread and then dropped it without resolution. For instance, at the beginning of the book we find ourselves in London, where Paul has agreed to do a freelance article about how some old conduits are being used now for fibre optic cables. This all ties in somehow with green construction, and he goes around London looking for examples of this. He doesn’t find any right away, and we never hear what happened with this article, the proceeds from which were supposed to cover part of the costs of moving to Wales from California. Did he ever write it? Did he make stuff up? What happened? The reader is left hanging.

This sort of thing happens over and over again throughout the book. Paul is hired to organize a section at one of the bookshops in town, owned by the man who made the town into the used bookshop haven it is today. He works on it diligently for a good fraction of the book, and then suddenly he mentions that he is done working there, with no real explanation as to why. Was he finished? Did he quit? What happened? The family looks at several houses, and clearly they do not end up buying any of them, but the interactions with the current owners trail off without any satisfying conclusions.

In the midst of these unfinished anecdotes that make up the bulk of the story are little bits of information and quotations which the author has pulled from old books, obscure and not so obscure. For many of these inserts he provides a proper citation, with the book of origin’s title, author and date of publication. And for others he provides no citation at all, throwing them out as random bits of trivia. Random bits of hard to check trivia. I know this isn’t a scholarly work, but if you’re going to say things that sound too odd to be true, then surely you’re well aware of how they sound and of the potential need to back these assertions up with proof. Some sources might have been nice.

The writing itself flowed well and struck just about the right note of humor. I kept wanting to compare him to John Hodgman; he certainly isn’t in the same class as Hodgman or even Dave Barry at his best, but the prose was very readable, and the selections from older books were varied and interesting. I would like to compare him to Bill Bryson or Peter Mayle but, alas, I have not yet gotten around to reading either of them, so I can’t.

In Short
The title of this book is somewhat misleading, as the author acknowledges midway through the book, when Sixpence House finally appears for the first time. It seems, at times, that the author could not decide if this was a straight up memoir or a collection of anecdotes tied together by various bits of obscure quotation from out of print books. It was interesting to read, though I wish he could have made up his mind as to which direction he was going to go. The book would have been better for being more focused, with more attention being paid to either tightening up the stories or packing in info from even more random books. These issues are probably as much a result of poor editing as they are the author’s scattered attention. But while it was not the best book ever, it did provide a fascinating little glimpse of Hay on Wye, and I do now intend to attend the Hay Festival at some point.