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Author, Fever Pitch, About a Boy, High Fidelity, and How to Be Good
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Director, Commonwealth Club Book Awards
Barbara Lane: Having written all these male-centered books, why did you decide to write How to Be Good from the female point of view?
Nick Hornby: When I thought of the story, it seemed like it needed to be told from the female point of view. I wanted to write about a marriage, a marriage that was under strain, and I wanted one of the partners in the marriage to undergo a fairly dramatic spiritual conversion and the other one to comment on this conversion. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that it would be the guy who would go from being disappointed, bilious, angry and cynical to intemperately embracing this rather bizarre new vision that comes to him after he's been healed. That left me with Katie to narrate. This is not a novel about what it's like to be a woman; that would be presumptuous of me.
Lane: Judging from your excerpt, you seem to be making fun of liberals a little bit.
Hornby: I'm a liberal, unrepentantly so, but I often wonder and fear what would happen if I were confronted by any of my liberal beliefs, by somebody who actually who wanted to put them into practice. The book comes out of that to some extent.
Lane: It does deal with this thorny question that's stated in the title. How can we be good if we're stepping over homeless people on our way to expensive restaurants and how can we be good in light of the world around us today? That is a tough one.
Hornby: Yes, and I think the answer is probably that we can't be. We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?
Lane: Before his big change, David is the "Angriest Man in Holloway," the district in which he lives, in which you live. He writes a column with that title. It's his job to spew bile in the newspaper, worse and worse every day. What it finally comes down to is maybe we can't change the world but we can have some effect on what you call "life in your postal district." So we're really talking about individual responsibility.
Hornby: Yes; I think that's what the book's about, and it comes as something of a shock to Katie, who feels that she has taken enough individual responsibility with her job. It's her mantra all the way through the book - "I'm a good person, I'm a good person, I'm a doctor." Suddenly she doesn't feel good enough and she hasn't taken enough responsibility, and it's in that shortfall that the narrative of the book takes place.
Lane: Things do go a bit awry when everybody in the neighborhood invites a homeless person to live in their home.
Hornby: This is David's big plan, and again, to a certain extent, a lot of the questions that David poses are unanswerable: "If you have a big house and there's a spare bedroom in it, and there's someone sleeping rough outside on the pavement, shouldn't you offer the spare room to the person sleeping rough outside on the pavement?" Katie doesn't really know what to say to that, but David goes on a campaign for everyone on the street to take one in, with semi-disastrous consequences.
Lane: There's also a sense of "be careful what you wish for." At the beginning of the book Katie is thinking about leaving her marriage because David is so angry, so awful, and so bitter. Then her wildest dream comes true: David undergoes this conversion, goes over the edge really, and she can't deal with that either.
Hornby: He is very loving and patient but very focused on the world outside the home, and this completely confuses her, because I think she's gotten used to David's cynicism, and she says at one point that she misses it when it's gone. David and Katie go to a dinner party with two friends of theirs; the guy is on the bottom rung of the media ladder, like David. Their usual dinner party conversation is just how rubbish everybody is apart from them.
I got sick of hearing why everyone was useless, and ghastly, and talentless, and awful, and how they didn't deserve anything good that had happened to them, and they completely deserved anything bad that had happened to them. But this evening, I long for the old David - I miss him, like one might miss a scar or a wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic. You knew where you were with the old David. And I never felt any embarrassment, ever. Weary despair, sure, the occasional nasty taste in the mouth, certainly, flashes of irritation, almost constantly, but never any embarrassment. I had become comfortable with his cynicism, and in any case, we're all cynical now, although it's this evening that I recognize this properly. Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and I'm not fluent in it - I like too many things, and I'm not envious of enough people - I know enough to get by. And in any case, it's not possible to avoid cynicism and the sneer completely. Any conversation, say, about the London mayoral contest, or Demi Moore, or Posh and Becks and Brooklyn, and you are obliged to be sour, simply to prove that you're a fully functioning and reflective metropolitan person.
Lane: They can't get through the evening because there's nothing to talk about. Once you've decided to be kind to everyone, what are you going to do, after you comment on the new décor in the kitchen? So, while there are very funny passages throughout this book, it seems that your books are getting more serious.
Hornby: Yes, I think this one's probably quite a serious book, although I do hope it has jokes in it. I couldn't write a book that didn't have jokes in it.
Lane: Who are the writers that make you laugh?
Hornby: P.G. Wodehouse made me laugh and still makes me laugh a lot, and one of the things I like about him is that there's no pretension that the books are really about anything at all. It's just, "my job is a comedy writer, and I'll write about any nonsense if it gets a laugh." And it does. That is a message of pure comedy. There's that old Seinfeld thing of "what's it about?" And who cares? It's funny. The same goes for Wodehouse. Parts of the Dave Eggers book are fantastically funny, and I think the person who taught me that you could be funny and serious and sad at the same time was Anne Tyler.
Lane: I wonder if humor is underrated, or people just aren't that funny anymore, or if those people aren't getting published.
Hornby: It's an interesting question. The process you have to go through to get a book published is quite difficult, because books are judged by essentially serious-minded people. The kind of people that tend to write in the Times Literary Supplement are not stand-up comedians. I think this attitude that if you're going to write books that have any kind of ambition shouldn't have jokes in them, might deter people.
Lane: As a writer in the UK familiar with the literary scene, what do you think happened to create the sensation with the Harry Potter books there?
Hornby: Like all books that have that kind of momentum, it starts from word of mouth. Things start to burgeon right out of control. It's happened at home with Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Birdsong, Bridget Jones's Diary, and High Fidelity. You can just feel that everyone in the country is reading them. Rowling has such an extraordinary visual imagination.
Lane: Moving on to High Fidelity, you and Stephen Frears, the director of the movie, were excoriated for the fact that the movie took place in Chicago rather than in a particular neighborhood in London. Did you feel vindicated when the movie came out? Everybody loved it.
Hornby: I never had any doubts that it would be good right from the moment I met the people who were going to be adapting it. They're very smart, and they're very funny. They love the book. They want to transfer as much of the spirit of the book into the screenplay as possible. When I understood the level of care and attention the book was going to get, I didn't think that there would be a problem. Also, having toured the book here, nobody ever said to me, "I loved your book, it's what it's like to be English." They always said, "I loved your book, my brother's like that." Englishness never really came up at all, so I didn't see it as a problem. It's a book about a record store and failed relationships. America probably invented both of those.
Lane: Do you feel you have done male/female relationships a service or a disservice? Some men almost feel betrayed by your blisteringly accurate portrayals of psyches and attitudes toward dating and women.
Hornby: I'm all for peace and harmony between the sexes. If the more pathetic male ruses were exposed in the book, at least it will make them think of some others. I plead absolutely not guilty. But I have to say that as the book has had more of a life, more and more women have come up and said that they didn't think it was a guy book, that it was about them as much as it was about guys that they knew. In the end, Rob is just a guy who can't make a relationship work and doesn't really know what he wants from life. I think that's a pretty gender-neutral state of mind in the end.
Lane: Which again goes back to the issue of writing from a female perspective in this new book - that it wasn't such a major change.
Hornby: No. That response encouraged me, because I think there's so much invested now in telling us that the sexes are a long way apart and can't understand each other. You go into a bookstore and there are millions of books on the subject, and every single magazine cover tells "ten ways you can understand your man" and that sort of thing. I bought into that for a while. But I live with a woman, and I'm very rarely mystified by what she does on the grounds of her gender. It just doesn't come up in the normal run of things.
Lane: I have to imagine that after the publication of High Fidelity, people sent you "top five" lists a lot. What are your top five, all-time, "Desert Island Discs"?
Hornby: I could never do an all-time "top-five" apart from "Let's Get It On," which closed the movie and which is always in there. But certain songs mean different things at different times. At the moment, songs I couldn't survive without are songs that are very very loud and get me through the book tour. I'm listening to a band called Marah and a song called "Reservation Girl." I listen to that all the time, and a Teenage Fanclub song called "Everything Flows," and "Kitty's Back," by Bruce Springsteen. Things that pump me up, because it's knackering, touring. When I get home it will be five different songs.
Lane: You are writing about pop music for The New Yorker, which hardly has a demographic of the young, concert-going reader.
Hornby: I guess so, but one forgets how the world has changed. Anyone under 55 or 60 now has grown up, at least in part, listening to pop music. Bob Dylan just turned 60. It's no longer high-culture versus low-culture, youth versus age thing. It's just a part of all our lives. The Stones, the Beatles - this is what middle-aged, middle-of-the-road easy-listening music is now. It's rock music.
Lane: How do you write about the way that something sounds?
Hornby: Music's really tough. I tend to rely on placing things culturally and little riffs on the kind of people who might listen to this music, and comparing it to other music. I think the very best music writers can nail down a sound. The trouble with music writing is that you are prone to pretension if you do that. It has to be done sometimes.
Lane: Back to High Fidelity. You once said that there's scarcely any description in that book: "I find description difficult. I always hate descriptive passages as a reader and, probably as a consequence, loathe writing them."
Hornby: I have a really low boredom threshold. When I was a kid, I remember being given all these short stories and told that this was what short story writing was. Pages and pages about trees, and then they ended. I never, ever wanted to write about anything like that. The books are set in cities. You can be really sketchy about it. Like an artist does a couple of lines and people immediately recognize what it's supposed to be. You can get by with that if you're writing for people who know what you're talking about. To a certain extent, that's what I do.
Lane: I realized after reading that interview that I don't know what your characters look like, but I do know who they are.
Hornby: I'm not interested in what they look like. I'd much prefer other people to make up their own minds about that.
Lane: How did you prepare for writing about issues dealing with marriage, with the same success that you achieved when writing about serial relationships in High Fidelity?
Hornby: These things that I write about, not only have I experienced them but they are unavoidable. If you're any kind of human, you are going to have relationships. You are going to talk to guys and women; your friends are going to be happy, unhappy, or disappointed. You don't need to prepare in the way of a historical novelist. I just use what I've got.
Lane: But marriage is difficult. In High Fidelity we have a 30-something, grappling with the idea of commitment, and in About a Boy, a really profound relationship develops between Will and Marcus. Here, we have a real-life marriage that undergoes tremendous strain and difficulty, yet I don't think it's giving too much away to say that, when it's all said and done, they're working at it.
Hornby: Yes. Katie uses this rather gruesome and graphic metaphor about being stabbed. When you have a knife in your stomach, do you take it out or do you leave it in? The medical advice is that you leave it in, because it helps to staunch the bleeding. That's the conclusion that she comes to. She has to leave the knife in.
Lane: David in How to be Good is the definition of aggrieved. Where are you on the aggrieved spectrum?
Hornby: I don't really feel aggrieved anymore. I used to feel pent up. I think a lot of unpublished writers feel the same way. They're not getting anywhere, and nobody's listening to them. You do get frustrated. I do have wonderful outlets now, and I have a pretty good life.
Lane: Your books are filled with references to contemporary culture - do you ever worry that it will date them?
Hornby: Not in the slightest. It started to irritate me, actually, that more writers don't use contemporary references. A lot of them don't do it because they do worry about posterity. I think that's pretty arrogant, really. You're not worried about who's going to read you now, but you're worried about who's going to read you in a hundred years' time. I want to take care of this side of things first. I use popular culture to place people. There's an absence of all the old class nuances that we used to have when we looked at people; popular culture is a better way of doing it now. You can work at who somebody is from what they watch and read and listen to.
Lane: Fever Pitch is about your obsession with the Arsenal soccer team. You write at the beginning of that book that your parents were getting separated, and that was your living room, going with your Dad to those soccer games.
Hornby: It was somewhere to go at a time when we didn't really have anywhere to go, so it was a big deal for me to spend an afternoon with my dad in an unpressured way. Children are not great conversationalists; when you're only seeing your dad on a semi-regular basis, and somebody sits you down and says, "how's your life going?" and you're only 11 years old, you just look at your feet. You don't know what to say. If you're at a soccer game, there's something going on in front of you that you can talk about.
Lane: Has something happened, other than simply growing older, to make you concerned about being responsible?
Hornby: I guess my own domestic situation. I'm the father of an autistic child, and it does kind of change you. There's a very thick line that's drawn when that happens. It becomes pretty clear to you what your responsibilities are and what you have to do, even if it's hard. For Rob, if he doesn't experience that, there will always be a gray area in his life. Something really concrete that happens helps a lot to sort you out.
Lane: Speaking of your son, you edited a collection of short stories called Speaking with the Angel and got many of the best short story writers around - Zadie Smith, Irvine Welsh, Helen Fielding, Roddy Doyle - to write for this book. It's sort of a literary benefit, where all of the money goes to TreeHouse, a special school you and your ex-wife co-founded for autistic children. I hate to suggest this, but it sounds like you're being good. It's how to be good, and you're taking care of your particular piece of it.
Hornby: I basically asked some friends to write something, and they did, and it was harder for them, because they were giving up however long it took them to write a story. There was a spell last summer when I was logging on in the morning, and there were three stories: one from Dave Eggers, one from Helen Fielding, one from Melissa Bank, that no one else in the world had seen. All original stories, all written especially for the book. That's not work or being good, it's just fun.
Lane: In Mark Crispin Miller's collection of criticism of television, Boxed In, he has an introduction called "Hipness Unto Death." How have you seen irony take over people's lives in the last few decades?
Hornby: I got sick of it. It's one of the things How to be Good is about, really. You can't fathom what people mean anymore, or rather, you can't fathom what they feel about things anymore, because they hide behind it all the time. The challenge of writers is to take on board irony and reject it at the same time, which is a tough thing to do. You want to be sincere, but you don't want to do it in some kind of dewy-eyed, sentimental, stodgy way. We've got to try to be ironic without being ironic, or recognize our irony without being ironic ourselves.
Lane: That's very tricky. Are you currently working on a screenplay with Emma Thompson? I read that somewhere.
Hornby: Yes. I was a bit worried that it was going to be made way before it was ready. I didn't think it was very good. It was sent to her to direct, I think. She hasn't done any directing, but someone heard she was interested in directing. I went to talk to her about it, and she was more interested in acting in it than directing it. But the ideas she had for it were so amazing - they unjammed me and unstuck the narrative. I thought it was way beyond what an actress would normally offer to a screenplay. So, I asked her if she wanted to start again with it, and we'd sit down in a room together. It was a fantastic experience, a) to write with someone, because I got fed up with sitting on my own in a room, and b) to work with someone as smart as she is. When you go to the toilet, and there's an Oscar sitting on the cistern, you think you're in the right place.
Lane: A writer's life is solitary. How do you like the marketing, public reading, and other non-writing activities of the modern writer's life?
Hornby: I like it. I don't like the traveling or being away from home, particularly, but if you've had two years in a room, you're just about getting to the stage where you want to talk to some people. I get excited about having finished a new book. It's virgin territory to read out loud and talk about it, and then you do it for too long and you want to get back in the room again. It works out okay.
