 INTERVIEW About a Man British writer Nick Hornby writes about all the supremely guy-ish pursuits: soccer, rock and, yes, crying over girls. BY JONATHAN MORROW |
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Nick Hornby Powell's 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651 7:30 pm Monday, April 26 Free See the author's responses to online queries. In 1992, after teaching for a number of years, Cambridge-educated Nick Hornby made a remarkable entrance into the British literary world with Fever Pitch, a book documenting his longtime affair with Arsenal, his beloved soccer team. The work became a bestseller not just because of its illuminating revelations about avid football fandom but because it was such a refreshing, intelligent and personal take on the contemporary world, from love and music to the politics of policing at football games. Hornby followed this up with another bestseller, High Fidelity, a novel about a music fanatic/record-shop owner whose girlfriend dumps him for the guy living upstairs from them. The book caught on in this country, earning strong reviews from publications as diverse as The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly. WW contacted the writer in his London home last week just before he was about to embark on a U.S. tour to promote the paperback of his third book, About a Boy. WW: Although Fever Pitch is written as a diary, with each entry revolving around a particular Arsenal game, it's clear that it was designed to be a book. What advantages did you see in using such a form? Nick Hornby: At the time, all I'd ever written were book reviews and a few short stories, so the prospect of a lot of 800- to 2,000-word pieces made the prospect of writing a book seem much less daunting. But the "match report" idea was a hook, too--the publishers really liked the idea, and it helped get the book a commission. But most of all it helped me to dot about, introduce new themes, tell a narrative and discuss [the disaster at] Hillsborough. When you wrote the screenplay for Fever Pitch, how difficult was it to adapt the diaristic form to fit the more linear narrative required of popular film? Very difficult at first--really, the screenplay and the book are two different pieces of work--but the narrative in the film was designed to accommodate as many of the themes in the book as it could carry, and that took some fiddling around with. Were you ultimately satisfied with the film version? I love the film as a film, but it's really not a "version," and I know some people were disappointed with that. The people who had no preconceptions seemed to love it as much as I did. At several points in the book, you express concern over being accepted as a true Arsenal fan. To most readers, your loyalty is hardly in question, but how was the book (and, eventually, the film) received by other Arsenal supporters? They've been fantastic. Young and old, middle-class and working-class, whoever. They've all been very, very positive about the book and film--or at least the ones who've come up and talked to me about it. The really amazing response has been from fans of other clubs. I didn't think they'd read the book, but they have and have understood that the team itself is immaterial--the feelings are the same whoever you follow. How do you manage to follow Arsenal and go on book tours, attend to family matters, etcetera? I'd never missed a game through work until I started writing, but now I have to miss a couple most seasons. I'm missing one on this book tour. I didn't miss a home match in last year's Double season, though, which is a source of great pride. When you live so near the ground it's easy: I'm only gone two hours! Music plays a big part in all three of your books, but it's especially important in High Fidelity. Why do you think so many people, men particularly, see music as such a crucial element in shaping their self-identities or self-mythologies? There's a lot of things connected with music, of course--cool, drugs, clothes. For me, though, it enables men, a race that have trouble sometimes expressing themselves directly, to connect with something that can be overwhelmingly beautiful and a very direct articulation of emotions. In both High Fidelity and About a Boy, the big struggle seems to be in the choice between being single and living with someone. One benefit of being in a relationship is avoiding the loneliness that comes with the single life, but this comes at a price, namely having k.d. lang and Joni Mitchell albums polluting your record collection. In the list form that worked so well in High Fidelity, would you name the top five things about being single and the top five about being in a relationship? Ha! The best five things about being single: 1) The idea that at any moment, maybe even this evening, you might be about to meet your perfect soul mate, someone who looks like Cameron Diaz and thinks like Iris Murdoch, etcetera. 2) You get to see your own friends, not anybody else's. 3) The usual bathroom and remote control stuff. 4) When the phone rings, it's for you. (It's invariably your mum, but at least it's your mum.) 5) Watching the video of Arsenal's record-breaking '90-'91 season again is regarded by all the occupants of your household as perfectly reasonable behavior. Five best things about being in a relationship: 1) The constant distractions of point one above can be laid to one side, hopefully forever. 2) You don't have to worry about what you're doing at weekends. 3) Conversation can get really, really trivial--if the redial button on your phone is stuck or you lose a button from the fly of your 501s, someone out there knows about it. 4) You get birthday presents you actually want. 5) Kids--a good thing--are a possibility, maybe even an actuality. Like all of your books, High Fidelity seems very British (and very London), but it's being adapted for the screen by American actor John Cusack, who also wants to star in the movie. Do you have any misgivings about the film being set in America? No misgivings whatsoever. The adaptation is great. I love John Cusack's work, and the director, Stephen Frears, is North London and understands. The quality of the people involved far outweighs the advantages gained by keeping the film in England. And if the book is so London, why do people in Scotland get it? Or Italy or Germany? It's a book about music and fucked-up relationships, and that's pretty American anyway. How is the project coming along? How much are you involved in it? I'm not involved in any official capacity, but I'm sent each draft of the script, and people seem genuinely interested in and concerned about what I think. It's New Crime's project, but there's a lot of cooperation. They start filming in a couple of weeks, I think. Your latest novel, About a Boy, reveals some of the concerns that many men have about trying to stay cool as they pass through their 30s. Do you see this anxiety as a relatively new phenomenon? How are you coping with it? Is it possible to hold onto one's youth without looking like a wally? I think this is a new phenomenon. Youth has never been as highly valued or sought after as it is now; everything in the culture wants to keep us young, not least because that way we have to spend lots of money. I'm coping OK, I think. There is some stuff--combat trousers, speed garage, whatever--that I think are best left well alone if you're 42. And other stuff--Wilco, Paul Westerberg and a lot of the alt-country bands--that kind of fits. Do you think the definition of a mature man is changing? I think people are really confused about this now. Before, you could have the trappings of maturity and pull the wool over everyone's eyes; now you're allowed to and encouraged to do a lot of things that younger people do, you can see that maturity has to come from within, not outside, and that's both vague and vaguely frightening. You've said that you tend to read books by women because they seem more grounded in reality. Which women writers do you particularly like? And what kind of responses to your work have you gotten from women? Anne Tyler and Lorrie Moore in particular--that brilliant, and typically American, mixture of sadness and humor that British writers can't seem to manage. The response from women is now as strong as the response from men. My first readings, for Fever Pitch, were 95 percent male, but now the mix is 50-50. There was this whole thing about how women had to read High Fidelity to find out how guys think, but a lot of women who read it for that reason have told me that they actually identified with Rob. Rob is confused, directionless, worried about his love life--that's a transgender thing! What do you think about the current literary scene in Britain? A little derivative. A recent review I read began "Irvine Welsh/Helen Fielding/Nick Hornby readalikes--aren't ya sick of 'em?" I am. What are your feelings about music at the moment? Who are you listening to? I find a lot to listen to. The stuff I mentioned before, plus Steve Earle and his sister Stacey, Lucinda Williams, Underworld, Teenage Fanclub, Radiohead, Smog--all sorts. There's as much good music being made as has ever been made, but what has changed, and depresses rock critics, is that the idea of music as a unifying force and an instrument of social change has gone. It's all too fragmented for that. I don't care, really; I was always a private consumer. What's the latest on the screen adaptation of About a Boy? About a Boy is ticking along. Peter Hedges, the writer of What's Eating Gilbert Grape, is doing the adaptation, and he's great. What are your plans for the future? My plans are simply to get better at what I do, and maybe in a variety of media. This year I've been working on a couple of original screenplays. We
asked our our readers to write in with questions. From Tony and Debbie Rutt: If you had to give up football, music or women, which would it be? I don't know how you "give up" any of them--they're all around you, all the time. So I guess the answer is smoking. Is the movie of Fever Pitch coming out in the United States? There is a distribution deal, and I believe it's coming out shortly, in a very few cinemas. From Cecil Reniche: In High Fidelity, the protagonist and his friends devote a significant amount of time to the making of compilation tapes, the content of which is indicative of their relationships with the recipients of the tapes. What is more important in the giving of such a tape: the content or the time and energy spent in creating the tape? Time and energy is appreciated, of course, but if someone has spent a lot of time and energy putting together all their Throbbing Gristle bootlegs for your delectation, then it's not really going to help. How many vinyl albums do you own? Maybe two or three hundred now. I just had a bloodthirsty and very
brave, on my part, cull and got rid of a few hundred more.
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