Nick Hornby's new novel Just Like You is unlike his other work. Photo / AP
The writer has built a career on stories such as Fever Pitch and High Fidelity about the lives of white men and their passions. He tells Jonathan Dean why he wrote a black character for his latest book.
Nick Hornby's new novel, Just Like You, is about a white woman in her forties dating a black man in his twenties. Like all his work it is incredibly readable. Unlike his other work, though, it has few white men in it. There are two: one is an addict, the other impotent. This gets around the fact, much discussed of late, that nobody really wants to publish novels by or about white men at the moment. They are very off-trend.
"I don't know if I want to write about them any more," says Hornby, who built his career on books such as Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy. "I don't know what I've got to say about them."
It is a strange time to be a male novelist. Hornby's great success over the past 30 years gifts him a certain freedom, but it's tricky in general — with publishers taking a belated stab at diversity, while being aware that women account for 80 per cent of fiction sales. Just Like You, then, is timely, but as I glance around Hornby's office, a stroll from the home of his beloved Arsenal, and spot posters for, yes, Fever Pitch, but also for his film adaptation of An Education, Lynn Barber's memoir, it is a reminder that he has been varying his work for years. He seems relaxed, sipping coffee with his feet up, sucking on an e-cigarette, stacks of books on a shelf and all over the table.
He is aware that, especially in this year of Black Lives Matter, eyes will be on an author like him writing about a black man who has chats about race and gets tangled up with the police. The character has to be young, that is the point, but why make him black?
"Because," he says carefully, "the majority of my books are set in north London, and it began to seem like an omission or a lie that when I open my door I'm in a multiracial neighbourhood, yet I haven't written about that. Should my books stay white for the rest of my life? I don't think so." He pauses. This is tricky terrain. "That's all I can say: I wanted the book to represent my city."
Just Like You has teachers, kids, north London, divorce, Arsenal — all of which have played a part in Hornby's life. But he says there is no autobiography here. "You write yourself out the further you go," he says. "The women thing started like that." He means the fact that in his third novel, How to Be Good, he wrote a female lead and has largely adapted books with female leads.
"I came to believe that women had more problems than white men, and white men's problems are mostly internal. That's certainly the case with High Fidelity and About a Boy. I tried to do the best I could with them, but there is something inert about that."
Hornby was inspired to be a novelist when he read Anne Tyler. Male authors when he was in his twenties, such as Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, "made no sense to me — the women made perfect sense". He has always had a large female readership and a female agent. Fever Pitch was edited by a woman and, if present concerns had been around when he was starting out in the early 1990s, maybe he would still have made it through a process … that isn't looking for people like him.
That said… "I'm thankful I'm not 30 years younger and having to make my way in the world," he says, before arguing that if you want to be part of a cultural conversation now you should write for television.
Isn't it a bit depressing that young men don't read novels? "My 17-year-old is supersmart and he's probably read about four books," Hornby says, laughing. "But does it matter? Does it matter if you watch five seasons of The Wire as opposed to reading a so-so Booker novel? What are you not getting?" The general opinion is that reading is more refined. "Yes. And I know why I read — because of the time I was brought up in. I was clinging to a lifeline and was never bored when I was reading. But my kids are never bored. Good luck to them."
Just Like You takes place around the EU referendum in 2016. Hornby says "of course" he voted Remain, but also that he put a £50 ($97) bet on Leave to ensure a win-win. Does he bet on Spurs winning the derby? "No, never." Does he know anyone who voted Leave? "Some. It tends to be people's parents who don't live in London."
Despite the bubble he is in, his writing about the referendum is, if anything, kinder to the side that was victorious. This is his great skill — empathy. The inspiration for his novel came from a visit to the Stoke Literary Festival just before the vote. Tristram Hunt, the local MP at the time, told him he hadn't met a single person voting Remain. Hornby learnt about a project to buy council houses for £1 ($2). Next day he heard George Osborne say leaving the EU would knock £30,000 ($58,300) off your house price.
"I thought that was hilarious as an appeal for Remain if you live in Stoke," says Hornby. "Even now [when I talk to friends who opted to stay], they say they wanted their kids to go to university abroad and, well, the vast majority of kids don't go to university abroad. And also to people who feel marginalised that must sound very feeble. We're still stuck in a loop and, for most, from a position of ignorance. That interested me. How come all my music-mad film critic friends suddenly knew WTO deals were no good? It became much more a matter of faith."
Yet Hornby refuses to give up. Partly because, he admits, he does rather love London, where his children go to state school and mix with a wider variety of locals than he did growing up in Maidenhead. It's a capital city where people of all incomes voted, by and large, to stay in the EU and don't mind immigration. Also, crucially, he is yet to write off the ability of human beings to get on with each other.
"Long term I'm quite optimistic," he says. "With everyone there are certain subjects where you're not going to get on well. This might turn out to be one of those, but one makes connections in unlikely ways. For me it's always passions. Miles Davis. Football. I can love someone and forget what their politics might be — this was written at a time I despaired about the nerve-jangling depression of watching Question Time, and a useless thumping up against each other."
Hornby, 63, is essentially a great communicator, an author who more than anything wants his work to be read. In Just Like You, a character mocks a novel written without the letter E, the anti-Hornby. In 2000 he reviewed Radiohead's Kid A for The New Yorker and gave the difficult album a scathing takedown…
"That's what I'm most famous for!" he says, laughing. "There's a sculptor called Nick Hornby, and he forwarded me an email that said, 'Today is the 20th anniversary of the most stupid thing I've read.'" He creases up. Anyway, both the novel without Es and Kid A bring up the question of difficult versus enjoyable art. Does the latter — which Hornby undoubtedly does — get the respect it deserves?
"Well, enjoyment always wins," he says. "They tend to be the things that last. Dickens couldn't get Bleak House reviewed because he had been written off as a popular novelist. My review of Kid A was intemperate, but I was frustrated by this band who can write the greatest songs hiding away from that."
He cites a section of The Intellectuals and the Masses where John Carey writes about poets of the 1920s who obfuscated their work in case they courted popularity. Once asked what it was like to be a middlebrow novelist, Hornby said: "Anyone can be as long as they do a couple more drafts."
He likes happy endings as they help people. "That's another thing I find baffling about difficult works; the denial of hope." The great art we have valued most, he argues, was done by artists who were mainstream in their time. Shakespeare, Dickens, Aretha, Elvis — all popular entertainers.
"When you get to the people who are difficult, they're probably in the second division," he says, a man whose career is Premier League. "All that worrying about posterity? If you want to last, you've got to be read or watched or listened to. There are very few exceptions to that."
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
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