THE COMPLETE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE
by Nick Hornby
Viking, £16.99; 288ppTOWARDS THE END OF my lunchtime encounter with Nick Hornby, I reveal that I’ve written a novel. “Oooh,” he says, raising an eyebrow, “I
do like it when literary editors write novels,” and while I’d never say there was malice in his voice — Hornby is one of the most delightfully unmalicious people you could hope to meet — it would be fair to note that there was a certain glee. And I can’t blame him, really: the unreliable tastes of “literary critics” have been touched on in our conversation.
“When I started being reviewed,” Hornby says, “I thought, ‘Oh God, I really want to know if my book’s any good or not’. I don’t read any of them any more, but when you read two people side-by-side and one of them is saying you’re a moron and the other is saying you’re a genius, you think: ‘OK, so now I’m being asked to choose which of these people is the cleverer.’ Because I’d kind of like to know the right answer. And then after a while you just give up.”
He laughs, and he may have lit another cigarette; there were certainly a few of them lit during the course of our lunch — how delightful, how rare, the unrepentant smoker.
The occasion of our meeting is both Hornby’s forthcoming appearance at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, and the British publication of The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, subtitled The Diary of an Occasionally Exasperated But Ever Hopeful Reader. This diary is, in fact, a collection of essays, originally written for the American magazine The Believer.
The Believer is part of what must now be called the indie-lit empire part-created by Dave Eggers, whose memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (AHWOSG to its fans, of which I’m one) was a sensation back at the turn of the century. Eggers is the brains behind McSweeney’s, the publishing house responsible for the literary journal McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the daily-updated literature and humour site McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the monthly journal The Believer, and a new DVD magazine, Wholphin.
The Believer is co-edited by Vendela Vida, Eggers’s wife, and has a simple manifesto: “We will focus on writers and books we like. We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt.” The working title of the magazine, its editors note, was The Optimist. Now, you wouldn’t have thought that the proposition — to be well-disposed towards books — would cause a fuss, but it did.
Co-editor Heidi Julavits declared, when the magazine was launched in March 2003, that it would have no truck with “snark” — otherwise known as the “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt” so familiar, presumably, to readers of book reviews.
“It really did outrage people, when she wrote that,” Hornby says. “It’s depressing to think that evaluating a book is the only thing you could do with it, as opposed to engaging with it, talking about it. I mean, I feel that way a bit about (Ian McEwan’s) Saturday. Because there’s plenty to debate in that book. And I wouldn’t even say that I didn’t like it because I found it incredibly stimulating for all sorts of reasons. But, yes, The Believer was taking away the divine right to slag people off, and that seemed to genuinely upset people.”
If people — by which we mean critics — have occasionally slagged off Hornby then this has never stopped people — by which we mean the folks who buy and read books — buying, reading, loving his work. His books Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy have been made into films — there’s another, American, version of Fever Pitch due out later this year. His latest novel, A Long Way Down, was shortlisted for last year’s Whitbread Novel of the Year Award. All in all, his British paperback sales have topped five million copies, and he’s been translated into 31 languages.
Readers love his books, and so they should; love them in the same way that they love the work of the writers he most admirers, writers such as Anne Tyler, Lorrie Moore and Roddy Doyle. Like them, he is humane, thoughtful and funny, too. He tackles serious subjects — suicide, in A Long Way Down, or morality (its methods, its applications) in How To Be Good. The Complete Polysyllabic Spree (TCPS, to its fans, of which I’m one) is an engaged and engaging ramble around one reader’s mind. He lists the books he’s bought and the books he’s read each month — though occasionally, if he hasn’t liked them, they must remain anonymous (see the No Snark rule, above).
His choices include Philip Larkin’s (very rude) letters, of which he says: “You get to have your cake and eat it: you look like un homme ou femme sérieux/sérieuse, but you feel like a 12-year-old who’s somehow being allowed to read Playboy in an English lesson.” He reads Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, his profound enthusiasm spurring me to finally get hold of it; he gets through a book about Mötley Crü e, The Dirt: “Weirdly, The Dirt isn’t a bad book. For a start, it’s definitive, if you’re looking for the definitive book on vile, abusive, misogynistic behaviour.”
Hornby loves reading, that’s all there is to it, and he wants more people to do it and fewer people to be afraid of it, or think it’s something that’s “good for you”. If you’re reading a book you don’t like, Hornby has some simple advice: stop reading. Pick another. It’s that easy. Read for pleasure, that’s all there is to it.
“My feeling is that we know the benefits of literacy and the comforts of literacy — but we still don’t know the benefits of reading the great works. I mean, there is no scientific proof that you will become a better, wiser person if you plough your way through Dostoevsky. Now, there are all sorts of reasons why I read the books that I read; but I think we’ve lost the sense of being able to tell people that what they should be looking for in a book is an emotional connection that makes you feel excited and alive, and you’re as likely to find that in a ‘literary’ novel as in a popular novel.
“I think one of the genius things about Richard and Judy was to say, here they all are, and you might be interested in David Mitchell and you might be interested in Jodi Picoult, but there’s no differentiation made on that list. And that, to me, is how it should be.”
A really good book, Hornby says, should make you walk into a lamppost. That’s because you can’t stop reading it when you are walking down the street. It happened to him with Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent; according to Hornby (and me) Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon is a lamppost book. “It’s basically a thriller thing, the lamppost business,” he admits, “but not always”.
As his Spree essays attest, his tastes are catholic indeed. He loves Dickens (and loved the recent Bleak House adaptation); he loves the graphic work of Marjane Satrapi. He’s up for anything. He’s my kind of reader.
He’s working on a screenplay at the moment, and a novel for young adults. But what’s he reading now, I ask, and even given those catholic tastes, I’m surprised when he says: Westerns. Westerns? Turns out he’s been watching Deadwood (and guess what? Now I am too. It’s brilliant) and that turned him on to Tom Franklin’s Hell at the Breech. Ever read Larry McMurtry? I ask. He hasn’t, and I tell him that Lonesome Dove changed my life — and the TV adaptation of that is mighty fine too.
“I find it incredibly refreshing reading things where people just kill each other, instead of having to remember that when you had only one glove on in 19th-century England it meant you were a spinster looking for a husband or for indeterminate work. It’s just: ‘He looked at me funny and now I’m going to kill him.’ I think, well, I kind of understand that.”
He laughs, and, yes, probably has another cigarette. We keep talking about books, and I’m having so much fun it’s nearly possible to forget, as the coffee comes, that I’m a critic. All that matters is this: I’ve remembered that some books you should stop reading, but others will make you walk into lampposts. Look out for the lamppost books.
www.Nickhornby.co.uk; www.believermag.com
Nick Hornby appears at THE TIMES Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 11. Call 01242 227979 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com
