This is a wonderful book — lucid, funny, sharp, truthful, cheeky, generous, erudite, surprise-crammed, and emanating a delicious tang of sophisticated amusement. I would love to continue in this vein but I’m afraid I mustn’t. It’s just not right. You see, the book is a collection of literary columns written by Nick Hornby for an American magazine. Each month he reflects on whatever he happens to have been reading, and the editor has given him absolute freedom to clodhop where he will across the sods of literature provided he utters no word against any author. The editor means it. When Hornby badmouths some writer by accident he gets sin-binned for a month as punishment. Hence my reluctance to write a kind review of this collection of kind reviews. Damn kindness! We writers are full of envy and hate, aren’t we? OK. Out come the knives.
I’ve followed Hornby’s career with half an eye (or perhaps a little more) since he emerged in the early Nineties. As I recall, his books have been about Arsenal, a record shop, a trustafarian and a teenager, some people on a ledge, and 31 tunes he rather liked. Perhaps I left out a couple of books there. Anyway, lousy materials, you’ll agree, so how has he built them into a career, no, an industry, worth tens of millions of pounds? The answer is literary marketing. Hornby has pondered the statistics wisely. Books are bought by women and men in the ratio of 7:3, so success depends on appealing to the 7 not the 3. Hence the peculiarly feminised air of Hornby’s novels (which I rate a fair bit lower than his non-fiction), which feel like extended acts of contrition for the author’s ineradicable sin of being male.
This hankering for sexual penance is detectable in these book reviews. The very word ‘man’ has him anxiously biting his lip. He seems to consider it somewhere between an impertinence and a gross insult. And where it appears in relation to any kind of achievement or distinction, it becomes blasphemous. He just can’t bring himself to type it. The phrase ‘man of letters’ is clearly an affront to women throughout the ages, so he writes ‘person of letters’ (which he pluralises into the still weirder ‘persons of letters’). In French, ‘homme’ gets a sex-change too. For ‘homme sérieux’ he creates the blissfully cumbersome phrase, ‘homme ou femme sérieux/ sérieuse’. And even when referring exclusively to adult males he still can’t break the taboo. ‘There are now nine people in the world who have walked on the moon.’ People? Come on, Nick. They were men, weren’t they? Unless — what? Neil Armstrong was a woman? Oh, I see. So that’s why Buzz Aldrin held back. Ladies first.
And I couldn’t help sensing a strange attitude to his fellow authors. Hornby loves to champion struggling youngsters but he becomes mysteriously hard to please when reviewing big hitters of his own age. He tells us he’s been enjoying Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, but then she records an incorrect football score. This leads him to question whether modern schools have full-time pottery teachers. And he’s then struck with dismay by an anachronistic reference to ‘Kunta Kinte’. And then what? ‘The fabric of the novel started to unravel.’ Bit harsh, ref.
When Hornby, who has an autistic son, picks up Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time he’s intrigued by the notion of a narrator with Asperger’s syndrome. He’s enjoying the book until he reads, ‘I decided it was a kind of puzzle’. Haddon’s narrator would apparently be incapable of this feat of mental willpower. ‘The truth,’ grieves Hornby, ‘gets bent out of shape.’ He then turns into a pre-Chatterley Lord Chamberlain. ‘Maybe it’s a book that can’t properly be described as a work of art.’ Uh? From a writer who believes a list of humanity’s greatest achievements must include Arsenal’s central midfield?
Well, anyway, that’s the end of the nasty bit, Hornby, you small-minded, nit-picking girlie-man. Now back to the kind review. I laughed on every page. I wanted to buy dozens of copies and give them to all my friends. It’s a hoot, a treasure, an absolute joy. Hornby is such an accomplished literary entertainer that one can happily apply to him the ultimate test of all critical writing. Is he worth reading even if you haven’t experienced the work he’s reviewing? Absolutely.
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