“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 hero of The Accidental Tourist, but the sentence could equally describe — and be written by — her acolyte, Nick Hornby.
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 we can escape into universal trivia — the comforting detritus of urban life.
This is the classic Hornby mode. No wonder Tyler is his favourite novelist. From her, he has learnt the winning blend of high comedy and aching sadness; the truth of the questing but terrified heart — found living and bleeding somewhere in London.
But 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 “Lad Lit” or “Aga Saga”? I doubt it. Considering genre, Martin Amis once described Elmore Leonard as “a literary genius who wrote rereadable thrillers”, pointing out that “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”. If someone wrote that about Hornby it would be a put-down.
Just as J. K. Rowling got non-reading boys hooked on Harry Potter, 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. His paperback sales total 6 million, excluding the US and translations. A Long Way Down went straight to No 1 in Italy, 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 is enough to make the average literary hack reach for the poisoned arrows.
After How to be Good was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2001, 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” — or unrealistic conceit — of four strangers (Jess, a damaged middle-class girl; Martin, a disgraced television 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? That particular criticism was about as valid as suggesting that it doesn’t ring true that Gibreel and Saladin plunge to earth from an exploded hijacked jumbo jet, clinging to each other, talking and singing songs, only to survive . . . which is 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.” Mars-Jones mocks Hornby’s “riffs” without explaining what a “riff” is — self-consciously riffing himself, to out-
muso the arch-muso while 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, as if the truly comic were not always shot through with sweet melancholy, characteristic of Shakespeare and Racine.
“Comic” does not mean “funny”, although they have become synonymous. In his classic 1965 text The Life of the Drama, Eric Bentley says: “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 the insufferable Martin) “an arsehole”. Not this time at least. Since one purpose of comedy is the entirely serious quest for self-knowledge, we need to mock those (such as Malvolio) who do not have it. So Hornby’s four inadequate, suicidal characters make jokes against themselves that are infinitely more purposive than those made against them. Towards the end 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 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?
EXTRACT
From A Long Way Down
And suddenly, just for a moment, I felt good. It helped that I really love cold Guinness; it helped that I really love Ed and Lizzie. Or I used to love them, or kind of love them, or loved and hated them, or whatever. And maybe for the first time in the last few months, I acknowledged something properly, something I knew had been hiding right down in my guts, or at the back of my head — somewhere I could ignore it, anyway. And what I owned up to was this: I had wanted to kill myself not because I hated living, but because I loved it. And the truth of the matter is, I think, that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way — I think that’s how Maureen and Jess and Martin feel. They love life, but it’s all fucked up for them, and that’s why I met them, and that’s why we’re all still around. We were up on the roof because we couldn’t find a way back into life, and being shut out of it like that . . . it just fucking destroys you, man. So it’s like an act of despair, not an act of nihilism. It’s a mercy killing, not a murder. I don’t know why it suddenly got to me. Maybe because I was in a pub with people I loved, drinking a Guinness, and I know I said this before, but I fucking love Guinness, like I love pretty much all alcohol — love it as it should be loved, as one of the glories of God’s creation. And we’d had that stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it’s moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you feel alive. And there’s music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who’ve read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavours, and I haven’t even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet, and . . . There’s plenty out there.
