Times Books - April 8th 2006

Nick Hornby: A LONG WAY DOWN

‘The effort of typing made the corners of his mouth turn down, so that no-one could guess how much he was enjoying himself.’

Anne Tyler is writing about the protagonist of ‘The Accidental Tourist’ but the sentence could equally describe, and be penned by, her acolyte, Nick Hornby. And her wry insight into the quietly fraudulent is itself open to question. What if the character’s mouth turns down, not through fingertip exertion, but existential misery? Who would know? Who would help? The next sentence appears to be irrelevant bathos: ‘I am happy to say that it’s possible now to buy Kentucky Fried Chicken in Stockholm’. So even if the tragic mask is real, not false, we can escape into universal trivia – the comforting detritus of urban life.

This is the classic Nick Hornby mode. No wonder Tyler is his favourite novelist. From her he has learnt the winning blend of high comedy with aching sadness; the truth of the questing but terrified heart – found living and bleeding somewhere in London. Yet Anne Tyler would never be dismissed as a ‘popular’ novelist, eminently readable though she is. Was a plant label ever punched out for her in durable metal – as in as in ‘Lad Lit’ or ‘Aga Saga?’ I doubt it. Considering genre, Martin Amis once described Elmore Leonard as ‘a literary genius who wrote re-readable thrillers,’ pointing out, ‘His characters are equipped…with a cranial jukebox of situation comedies and talk shows and advertising jingles, their dreams and dreads all mediated and second hand.’ Now, if someone wrote those exact words about Hornby it would be a put-down.

Just as J.K. Rowling got non-reading boys hooked on Harry, so we can praise Hornby for getting young men wearing Arsenal shirts to pick up a book – and keep picking them up almost as often as they sink a pint. But that is not all he has achieved. He followed the runaway successes of ‘Fever Pitch’ and ‘High Fidelity’ with ‘About a Boy’ and ‘How To Be Good’ and his paperback sales total 6 million, excluding US sales and translations. ‘A Long Way Down; went straight to number one in the Italian bestseller charts, and Robert de Niro’s production company paid £2 million for the rights to ‘About A Boy.’ And so on. Hornby books make movies - and money. It’s enough to make the average literary hack reach for the poisoned arrows.

After ‘How To Be Good’ was long-listed for the Booker, certain literati wanted to take this too-popular writer down several pegs. When ‘A Long Way Down’ was published in hardback more than one critic questioned the ‘high concept’ - aka unrealistic conceit - of four strangers (Jess, a damaged middleclass girl; Martin, a disgraced TV presenter; Maureen whose son is profoundly disabled; JJ whose band and girl have left him) meeting accidentally on a high rooftop famous for suicide and preventing each other from leaping off. ‘Unlikely’ they decided, prosaically. Do we have to be so literal when discussing literature? The particular criticism was about as valid as suggesting it doesn’t ring true that Gibreel and Saladin plunge to earth from an exploded high-jacked jumbo jet, clinging to each other, talking and singing songs, only to survive…which is, of course, how Salman Rushdie starts ‘The Satantic Verses.’ ‘Is birth always a fall?’ Rushdie asks. In ‘A Long Way Down,’ birth is a fall averted.

The opening of Adam Mars-Jones’s ‘Observer’ review set the tone: ‘P.G.Wodehouse may have been the last light-comic writer to be comfy in his pigeonhole. Since then it has become hard to find a jester who wants to play anything other than Hamlet.’ Repeatedly Mars-Jones mocks Hornby’s ‘riffs’ without ever explaining what a ‘riff’ is – self-consciously riffing himself, in order to out-muso the arch-muso at the same time as condemning him for ‘emotional truth processed into convenience food, insight that you boil in the bag.’

The reference to Hamlet and the jester falls into a convenient trap: bagging Hornby as a comic writer who wants to be tragic - as if there were no middle ground, indeed as if the truly comic were not always shot through with sweet melancholy, characteristic of Shakespeare and Racine. ‘Comic’ does not mean ‘funny,’ although the words have become synonymous. In his classic 1965 text ‘The Life of The Drama’ Eric Bentley says this: ’The comic sense…tries to deal with living, with the pressures of today, with the responsibilities of adulthood. Its dual character presupposes in the comic artist… on the one hand an eagerness and zest in sheer being, and on the other a keen and painful awareness of the obstacles in the path…’

That duality is quintessential Hornby. Where there is laughter in ‘A Long Way Down’ it is a neither cruel nor knockabout, but a moment of identification and brief superiority. You recognise the character, pity him or her, and laugh with relief because you are not (like insufferable Martin) ‘an arsehole.’ Not this time at least. Since one of the purposes of comedy is the entirely serious quest for self- knowledge, we need to mock those (like Malvolio) who do not have it. So Hornby’s four inadequate, suicidal characters make jokes against themselves which are infinitely more purposive than those made against them by others. Towards the end of the novel they are – yes – trying to be good - and have formed one of those uneasy allegiances of disparate people thrown together by a common need. Yet you know they will always dislike each other, since we cannot forgive those who know too much.

This is fiction transforming pain into the archetypal comic mode - through pity and laughter to purge the emotions. Hornby’s accessibility should be celebrated - offering millions of readers the gripping possibility of redemption. The ordinary bloke glimpses hope only to see it disappear behind a cloud, but goes on waiting because it will appear again. Won’t it?