Nick Hornby, who bemoans the contentedness of many British writers to operate on the margins of modern culture, has written a novel about the powers of the internet. He talks to John Butler
SUMMER RAIN flays the dormer windows of Nick Hornby’s top-floor office in Islington, and I can hardly hear the songs he’s playing through his tiny iPod speaker dock. They’re rough demos of an ongoing writing collaboration with American singer Ben Folds: Hornby’s words e-mailed across the pond then breathed into life by Folds’s warm Elvis Costello-ish voice, and shot back to north London in the form of MP3 files. I can hardly hear the songs, but I can hear them – I might be one of the first in the world to do so – and as I do, Hornby stands at the door, watching me.
The scene has Hornbyish overtones. In Juliet Naked, his first grown-up novel since 2005's A Long Way Down(2007's Slamis considered young adult fiction), the excessive fandom of a nebbish bloke in his 40s brings the executioner's blade down upon his long-term relationship. Annie despairs of Duncan's obsession with Tucker Crowe, the famous and reclusive American singer, and when a CD of long-lost demos surfaces, and her partner composes a disproportionately gushing review, she can take it no more and posts a more measured rebuttal online. To her astonishment, Crowe himself reads it on the fan site and chooses to respond to Annie. A long-distance relationship with the dumped boyfriend's hero ensues.
It’s a breezy (and at points very funny) book whose plot is borne along on the enabling, coincidence-making powers of the web, and, after reading it, not only might a middle-aged music fan be likely to interrogate the way they love music and for what reasons, but they might also question some of their online activities.
For this reason Juliet Nakedreads as something of a companion piece to High Fidelity, a novel with similarities of style and tone but that pre-dated the birth of the web, taking place in an era when music fans had no blogs to maintain, no MP3s to download, and had to content themselves with shopping (and working) in record stores. That it is a book for our times is no accident. "One of the things that frustrates me about books is that some people seem to be happy to operate on the margins of a cultural conversation. You think 'come on guys, you can't just moan about it, you have to think why are people buying box sets, and why – for a lot of them – reading books is not an option. It's narrative compulsion, and that's something that the novel seems to pay lip service to only intermittently."
It's refreshing to meet a writer who – though he laments the closure of high-street bookshops ("I doubt one copy of Fever Pitchwas sold in a supermarket") – is willing to look beyond the creeping advance of technology and place at least some of the blame for troubles in publishing at the feet of the writers themselves. That's not to say he doesn't acknowledge the promotional demands of the new market. "A lot of work has to be done for Amazon and online and supermarkets, providing them with bloggy bits and podcasting bits, but I don't really make a moral judgment, and I'm not nostalgic for the way things used to be other than there used to be a lot more bookshops and they're not there any more, but you have to deal with what there is and that's a brutal and complex world."
Leaving aside forays into blogging and songwriting, Hornby has found other creative outlets, as a frequent contributor to American literary journals the Believer and McSweeney's(founded by Dave Eggers). Both publications are considered to be at the vanguard of experimental but readable literary fiction, and it's in discussion of them and this genre of writing that my affable host delivers the closet thing to a barb you're ever likely to hear. " the Believer and McSweeney'swould never pretend that they hadn't been influenced by other things, and they're comfortable working in other mediums. Someone like Michael Chabon writes great novels . . . and Spider-Manmovies. It's hard to imagine some writers from the English literary scene being able to switch as comfortably between those worlds. I can't see Salman Rushdie or Julian Barnes writing Spider-Man. But it's cultural rather than generational. There's not enough in it, age-wise. It's more a sort of public-school, high literary culture thing, where . . . a lot of them weren't allowed to watch telly because of school."
He laughs when I tell him my brothers' class in boarding school convened weekly in front of the telly for Baywatch("like bromide in your tea or something"). Having written books about suicide and autism, football, music and parenting, Hornby could never be accused of operating on the margins of a cultural conversation, and his desire to reach as many people as possible by writing books is evangelical ("it's not harder to read chick lit than it is to watch an episode of The Wire").
He cheerfully admits to falling victim to the narcotic power of television. “I think there’s still a literary culture where when you talk about your writing you’re expected to name other writers as influences; as if any writer writing now is only going to be influenced by books – and, of course, it’s crazy. I watched so much TV growing up, and comics, and lots of the writing that influenced me was on television, much more than DH Lawrence.”
Readability is very often a stick used to beat writers of material as accessible as Juliet Naked, but 17 years after the publication of his wildly successful memoir of life as an Arsenal fan, the Fever Pitchman still cherishes what he consumes at least as much as the medium in which he's primarily occupied as a writer. Beyond the fandom lies a marked concern for the future of the book business itself. Clearly, it's hard to argue that people are reading enough, but is he worried about the disappearance of the book itself as a physical product, like the CD before it? "I don't think any music fan was committed to CD – they were committed to vinyl, but that was taken away and replaced by something that nobody liked. So when downloading started there was no reluctance to stop buying the physical product . . . People like buying books. The iPod was driven by young people pestering their parents, but I don't imagine young people pester their parents for e-readers – young people don't read enough."
“I went into Waterstone’s on a wet Monday afternoon and there was a huge pile of e-readers on the left and they were trying to sell them for, I think, £399. And on the right there was a huge pile of books . . . And no one was buying either. I thought, “hold on, you’re trying to sell someone something for £400 that will enable them to read something that they don’t want for £2.50? Good luck with that, as they say in America.”
Here, he sits back and gestures along the groaning bookshelves that run the length of one wall. “If we’re not going to have any music or film around our house, we’re going to need something that tells us who we are.”
Hornby has also recently taken a shot at feature adaptation, having turned a piece of memoir from Lynn Barber into An Education, starring Alfred Molina, Peter Sarsgaard, Olivia Williams and Emma Thompson. Given that it's a resolutely period film set in 1962 in London, and concerns the mores of a vanished world, it's strange to think that this most modern of writers ever took it on. But I can't hang him out to dry on that – not only is a job a job, but the story of the spiky interviewer's first love affair is a gripping one, and some national characteristics have endured from the 1960s to now.
How was the process of adaptation for him? “I loved it. I think it was kind of perfect. was short – it had 10 pages. It had characters, dialogue and structure, so you had the bare bones and could flesh it out. I tried with someone else’s book before, and the film didn’t get made, but that process is leaving 200 pages of someone’s 300 pages out. So the process of making 10 pages into 120 is much more gratifying.”
Both An Educationand Juliet Nakedconcern Englishness, and deal with an English delight in misery that characterises much of that country's art, from the poetry of Philip Larkin to the music of The Smiths and the gallows humour of Black Adder. It seems to dominate his writing, too. Is calling Hornby a miserabilist in any way fair? "It's part of who I am. This miserable sense of humour that runs through all the books, I think it can damage and constrict the soul. I mean there's a deep negativity in a certain strain of English culture, a sort of celebration of awfulness."
“One of the problems with England is weather and food. When you start to travel you think ‘okay I’m doing fine but if I was doing fine in this country, say, in Italy, my life would be . . . better’.” My tomatoes would taste better? “Exactly! I’d have more space too. I always get amazed by those wooden houses in America that are supposedly for poor people, and you see them and think ‘that’s a detached house! With a garden!’ I’ve got a beautiful house up the road, but pretty much the only way I could explain to a visitor from Mars how good it was would be to tell them how much it cost and how much other people’s cost.” The phone rings and he leaves the room to take the call. It’s still raining miserably, and when he returns a piece of Nicorette gum has been surreptitiously taken on board, and conversation slows to a more natural pace. “I have a duty to provide optimism on the part of my characters. There are plenty of other writers who will crush all hope on the part of the reader. And you do get to a stage where you think it’s not about telling the truth – it’s about a psychic choice. You are of a certain disposition as a storyteller or an artist and you think it’s your duty to . . . kill us. And I respect that choice. But I don’t want optimism to be left to those who just do the feel-good stuff. You know?”
For a while we talk about music and football and some of our favourite things, and though past struggles with depression are well documented, the man in the room exudes quiet contentment. It’s fascinating to consider when and how happiness arrives, if it ever does, and whether we ever stop comparing ourselves unfavourably with others. I put it to him as the rain stops and I get ready to leave.
“That’s interesting. I think one is always in two modes. The mode in which everything is fine and you’re doing interesting, good work, and I couldn’t ask for more from a career . . . And sometimes you get swept up in it and think ‘why is that bastard doing well? Why is he on that prize list?’ Most of the time I don’t feel competitive. I think it’s Philip Roth who said, ‘well, it’s a living’. That’s the only answer at the end.”
Juliet Naked, by Nick Hornby, is published by Viking, £18.99
PORTRAIT SIGRID ESTRADA