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Nick Hornby talks to penguin.co.uk about the domestic male, the
Booker Prize and his average day
NICK ON WRITING
I'm always rather amazed when people talk about your books as
being jolly accounts of popular culture. There are a lot potential disasters for
your characters and they're hanging on by the skin of their teeth.
Somebody said that it was the 'comedy of depression'. I think it is
why a certain group of people respond so strongly to the books, all the
characters are depressed.
I think you actually use the word depression in all the books?
I guess there are an awful lot of people out there who do feel
depressed and don't find that low level depression reflected in many books that
they read. Literature is usually much more crisis-focused.
You wouldn't describe your books as 'domestic', but you write about daily
lives and ordinary things, which maybe one doesn't get in a lot of books.
I don't mind my books being described as domestic at all. It was very
much an impetus when I started writing. I read a lot books by women and
identified with them much more because I lived a domestic life - and most of us
do - and that really wasn't reflected in any of the books written by men. It
seemed odd to me that most of us bring up families and go to work and yet the
books our male representatives are writing about huge things in history and
people on the edge. Of course we have a need for those books, but there did seem
to be a bit of a hole where no one was writing about what actually happened.
Was that reflected in your own reading? Who are the writers you admire
most?
At the time that I started writing I had just discovered the books of
Anne Tyler and Lorrie Moore. I'd never read a book that more precisely
articulated what I wanted to do than Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick
Restaurant. There were some depressed and lost characters and a lot of
humour, and I just felt this is what I want to be when I grow up. I had read two
Lorrie Moore books, Self Help and Like Life, just before Fever
Pitch came out. Again they had very sharp humour but were incredibly
accessible and I think it was something particularly at the time that had been
lost from contemporary British fiction.
Do you feel much more at home with American contempory fiction than
British fiction?
Yeah, I feel much more at home. I think there's always been that strain
of American writing that wants to write simply and accessibly, but
intelligently. I think in this country we are much more hung up on demonstrating
that you are writing a book and being clever about it, and consequently people
weren't reading them much here.
You're reading the British writers' books?
Yes. If you have a short-list of six Booker Prize books, people read the
one that wins. Because it won the other five are completely disregarded and this
is somehow supposed to be representative of our literary culture. I do think in
the 1980s there was a huge gap between best-selling books and literature, and
there really wasn't anything in between.
For me Roddy Doyle was an important part of that. When I read The Commitments
it was simple and funny. It was about things I understood and you could see a
great rush of identification with Roddy's books.
You've mentioned the Booker Prize. Do you think that awards such as this
misrepresent literature and the kinds of books that are out there?
I think that the Booker Prize sets a tone of a certain kind of literary
writer. As a young writer you're looking at two polarities that you don't really
like the look of. There was the Jackie Collins stuff on one side, and there was
this very difficult, dark, inaccessible literature on the other.
I think there is a general desire to read good books. People read books on the
way to work and before they go to bed. We've all had that terrible feeling that
you're making no impression on a novel at all and you're 30 pages in and there's
472 pages left and you've been reading it for three weeks already. I think the
Americans have always understood that once you have a price on the back of your
book there is some kind of contract you're entering into.
Yes, and American authors do have that pop-culture feeding in too.
It seemed obvious to me that popular culture is an important part of all
our lives and it should have some kind of reflection in the books we are
reading. I've never understood why people didn't describe or just mention what
TV programmes people were watching, I've always suspected it's something to do
with having an eye on posterity.
NICK ON NICK
Take us through an average day in the life of Nick Hornby.
I wander to my office, a small flat just round the corner from home. I
smoke, mess round on the Internet, email, and, eventually, start writing -
usually just when it's time to pick up my son from school.
What's on your bedside table?
Back copies of the New Yorker, Andrew Rawnsley's book about New
Labour, the new Michael Chabon novel and indigestion tablets.
What was the last film you saw?
At the time of the interview You Can Count On Me,, which I loved
to bits.
You are now the pop critic for the New Yorker - could you see
yourself ever living there?
My domestic circumstances wouldn't allow it at the moment, but I'd love
to live in the US for a while at some stage - San Francisco is the place I'd
choose.
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