 |
|
|
Nick HornbyNick Hornby
Back |
Genres |
Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
Contact details |
Printer-friendly version
Biography
Nick Hornby was born in Redhill, Surrey, England, in 1957. He graduated from Cambridge University and taught English to foreign students while reviewing for magazines including Time Out and the Literary Review. His first book, a series of critical essays on American novelists, was published in 1992. Fever Pitch, his memoir of a life devoted to Arsenal football club, was published in 1992. It won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and was adapted as both a play and a film, the latter starring Colin Firth.
His fiction continues to explore male obsessions, crises and weaknesses. His first novel, High Fidelity (1995), is the story of an obsessive record collector and list-maker, and was adapted as a film in 2000 starring John Cusack. His second novel, About a Boy (1998), focuses on the growing relationship between 30-something Will Freeman and Marcus, a 12-year-old boy. A film version, starring Hugh Grant, premiered in 2002. His novel, How to Be Good (2001), explores contemporary morals, marriage and parenthood. It won the WH Smith Award for Fiction in 2002. 31 Songs (2003), celebrates 31 songs of great significance to the author, and A Long Way Down (2005), was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Novel Award and for a 2006 Commonweath Writers Prize.
His latest novels are Slam (2007), and Juliet, Naked (2009).
In 1999 Nick Hornby was awarded the E. M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His book The Complete Polysyllabic Spree (2006) is an account of his reading and collects columns from Believer magazine.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Criticism, Essays, Fiction, Literary criticism, Non-fiction
Bibliography
Contemporary American Fiction Vision Press, 1992
Fever Pitch Gollancz, 1992
My Favourite Year: A Collection of New Football Writing (editor) Gollancz/Witherby, 1993
High Fidelity Gollancz, 1995
The Picador Book of Sportswriting (editor with Nick Coleman) Picador, 1996
About A Boy Gollancz, 1998
Speaking with the Angel (editor) Penguin, 2000
How to be Good Viking, 2001
31 Songs Viking, 2003
McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (contributor: 'Otherwise Pandemonium') Hamish Hamilton, 2003
A Long Way Down Viking, 2005
Not a Star New Island Books, 2006
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree Viking, 2006
Slam Puffin, 2007
Shakespeare Wrote for Money McSweeney's Books, 2008
Juliet, Naked Viking, 2009
Prizes and awards
1992 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Fever Pitch
1999 E. M. Forster Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters)
2002 WH Smith Award for Fiction How to be Good
2005 Whitbread Novel Award (shortlist) A Long Way Down
2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist) A Long Way Down
2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction) (shortlist) A Long Way Down
Critical Perspective
Nick Hornby's books have defined a generation of emotionally stunted male thirty-somethings. The 'heroes' of his early books are obsessives (collectors, fans), with compulsive energy where they should have had emotional maturity. In his first book, Fever Pitch (1992), the theme of the obsession is football (Arsenal in particular), and Hornby himself the hapless fan; by the second book, High Fidelity (1995), he has distanced himself slightly, creating the character of Rob, 35, music collector and, yes, emotional half-wit. These characters' obsessions and their romantic inadequacies, seen as consequences of these, appealed to something half-proud and half-ashamed in Hornby's readers, hence the broadly male readership; but his comic gifts and an element of smug recognition 'How true!' helped to widen his readership to women too. His popularity has also been spread by good film adaptations with two to date, and a third in production.
Fever Pitch was written, according to Hornby, not just for fully paid-up football fanatics, but also 'anyone who has wondered what it must be like to be this way'. And it does manage to be far more than just a football book; rather it is about the nature of obsession (football just happens to be the one under the spotlight in this case), this inconvenience which the 35-year old Hornby admits to carrying everywhere with him still, and which he tends to bring into situations where it simply doesn't belong. He uses his feelings about the game to explore questions of masculinity, of identity, of growing up, and doesn't shy from looking (albeit with a wry humour rather than any real sense of regret) at the damage such an obsession can do.
High Fidelity is rather different. Here the music, this main character's particular encumbrance, is more a frame of reference for that character rather than a subject or theme in itself. This is not a story about a man and his relationship with music, it is just that Rob thinks of everything in terms of his music (what he was listening to when... what it reminds him of ... etc.). Where Fever Pitch was not a book about football but about obsession with football, this isn't even about the obsession with music; it's about Rob and his relationships, and music is just part of the language. And of course there is an element of familiarity in this, an element of nostalgia added, meaning that we, the readers, needn't only read it with the music a part of the structure, in the abstract, we are attracted to those details we recognise specifically. Ah yes, I remember listening to that song myself... how true...
Rob runs a record shop, 'Championship Vinyl', in Crouch End; in fact he has been doing this for rather a long time, and is more than a little bemused to find where his life has taken him. Rob spends his endless days in the infuriating, hilarious company of Dick and Barry, his like-minded fanatical employees (the most wonderfully colourful characters in the book). As the novel opens he is taking stock after being left by his girlfriend Laura, part of this 'taking stock' involves reminiscing about all the other women who have left him. He feels sorry for himself, plays 'break-up songs' so he feels even worse. It's terribly self-indulgent and self-destructive, and it's all tremendously funny for us. Funny, yes, yet not actually all that extreme and, alas, probably truer than many would readily acknowledge.
Hornby's third book, About a Boy (1998), is a rather sadder book, with a considerably wider emotional range than either of its predecessors. This new dimension fills up the void created by the fact that unlike his predecessors in Fever Pitch and High Fidelity, here the narrator (Will, 36) doesn't have any interests at all; he very decidedly doesn't do anything. But the comedy and the emotional depth come from the same sources as the preceding books, from Will's general emotional inadequacy, from his relationships with women (despicable) and his relationship with peculiar and demanding twelve-year-old Marcus (admirable). In Marcus, Hornby has created one of his greatest, most memorable characters. The earlier books, and in particular the comedy of the earlier books, depended largely on strong and sympathetic but inadequate central figures, first-person narrators, and had no need to rely on interesting peripheral characters (that Dick and Barry are among the most memorable things in High Fidelity is almost accidental). The weaker drive of About a Boy is compensated for by the fact that young Marcus is every bit as plausible and distinctive as Will, and infuriating and endearing and very funny indeed.
In a way About a Boy is a transitional book. Its humour is reminiscent of the humour of Fever Pitch and High Fidelity, its territory (emotionally inadequate thirty-something male) the same, but it has begun to move towards an emotional maturity which Hornby finally attains triumphantly in with his fourth book, How to be Good (2001).
How to be Good is Hornby's biggest, most mature book, a novel of ideas in the way none of his work had been before it. Which is not to say that it has lost the humour of the earlier work, on the contrary, parts are every bit as funny; but it has lost some of the lightness, and gained a certain gravity. The main character is not an emotionally stunted 90s man with not a great deal to do, but a doctor, a woman doctor, and a sensible, responsible woman doctor as well. And surrounded by various kinds of difficult people Katie Carr, a doctor, is facing a serious moral/philosophical dilemma, not just wondering whom to bed tonight and how to go about getting them. And from Marcus (a funny kid not like a kid at all) it has progressed to Katie and David's children, who are just like real kids (and more's the pity for the rest of the characters).
How to be Good deals with questions of compassion, of morality and of familial and social responsibility, maturely and intelligently. To a large extent perhaps this great 'responsibility' is the same question as Hornby addressed in the earlier books; but over the years it's just the implied answers that have changed.
Daniel Hahn, 2002
Contact information
|
 |
