If Arsenal wins the double, Nick Hornby will be a happy man

By SIMON O'HAGAN

In the northern spring of 1992, a first-time author used to go into the London offices of the publishers Victor Gollancz and sit down with a copy editor as she worked on his manuscript. Although an established freelance journalist, "he was rather diffident," Viv Redman recalled last week. "The book didn't need an awful lot of work. He was such a natural writer. But if he thought changing something was a good idea he was very happy to go along with it."

Publication was in September of the same year. The print-run of a mere 5000 copies was no more than would be expected for a debut work by a writer few people had heard of. But hopes for its success were high.

A launch party was held at a restaurant in Covent Garden at which Liz Knights, Victor Gollancz's then editorial director, stood on a chair and made a speech that lauded the book to the skies. The author and a few dozen of his friends thoroughly enjoyed themselves, and everybody went home happy.

It was the start of a publishing phenomenon which, 10 years on, shows no signs of abating.

The book was Fever Pitch, an autobiography-cum-football memoir passionately written around tomorrow morning's FA Cup finalist Arsenal. The author was Nick Hornby, who would come to embody all Arsenal - all football - fans and whose literary sensibility would come to dominate a huge sector of the market, appealing not just to people who already bought books, but to those who never normally read them.

The term "Hornbyesque" entered the language of criticism. It denoted a wry intelligence in dealing with the age-old theme of relationships between men and women, with special reference to male obsessions and insecurity; and settings that rarely strayed from a narrow, contemporary locale in north London. There was consolation in the humdrum, and this formula, well-served by an almost artlessly conversational writing style, accounted for the purchase of Hornby's books in staggering quantities, by readers of both sexes.

Sales of Fever Pitch and the three novels that followed - High Fidelity, About a Boy and How to Be Good - run into millions.

His first three books have been turned into films. About a Boy, starring Hugh Grant, has opened in Britain and a couple of weeks before that Hornby's treasured status among the reading public was confirmed when How to Be Good won the WH Smith fiction prize for 2001, as chosen by readers.

There is, though, a sense in which this warmth of feeling for Hornby, the writer, mingles with sympathy for Hornby, the man.

For the personal backdrop to his career triumphs is a sombre one, and fate has set Hornby, 45 this year, on a path towards the sort of public role that friends say he would otherwise instinctively shy away from. In taking up the cause of combating autism, a condition which affects his son Danny and created pressures that in part led to the collapse of Hornby's marriage, the humourist has turned activist, without forgetting that wit can make the best weapon.

Pain and pathos seep through almost every page of Fever Pitch, which, early on, recounts how outings to see Arsenal were Hornby's father's way of finding something to do with his 11-year-old son after his marriage to Hornby's mother had broken up. The divorce affected Hornby badly, his troubles subsumed into the emotional energy he directed into following his now-beloved Gunners, who provided a dreamworld to which the middle-class kid from Maidenhead could escape.

He is still a regular at Arsenal matches. And, like all Arsenal fans, as you read this today he will be fretting and hoping that the North Londoners can out-gun the toffs from Chelsea in Cardiff early tomorrow morning.

He will know that Arsenal will change in the Millennium Stadium's lucky north dressing room - the one used by all nine of the teams to have won cups there. He will know they'll be wearing their red socks, not the usual white, and all the other cup final minutiae swirling around. He will be backing Henry, Bergkamp, Seaman et al with a fervour.

The drive to write was equally strong. One friend who knew Hornby when he was at Cambridge University in his early twenties says he has never come across anyone at that age with such a clear ambition of how he wanted to succeed.

That it was another 10 years before he would burst on to the scene - much of which Hornby spent teaching - was partly testimony to the care with which he worked out the story that would become Fever Pitch.

The question then was whether he could pull off the same beguiling trick in a novel, and when High Fidelity came along in 1995, it was clear that he had managed it very cleverly.

"A successful novel is often built on a very good non-fiction bedrock," one critic says. "With this one, Hornby made pop music the subject of the book in the way that Fever Pitch had been about football, with a love story grafted on top. Nothing succeeds in a novel like nous." The universality of its appeal was underlined by the ease with which, in the film version, events are transferred to Chicago.

In About a Boy (1998), a footloose thirtysomething bloke surprises himself by acquiring a kind of wisdom in becoming the surrogate father of a 12-year-old. Readers devoured it.

How to Be Good is Hornby's most ambitious novel so far in that his first-person narrator is a woman and his theme nothing less than whether pure goodness is possible in the modern world. The critic John Carey compared it to Dostoevsky, a claim which surprised those who saw an exercise that was just a bit too neat.

"Human nature is just not reclaimable in the way that Hornby's books would have you believe," one critic says. "Don't get me wrong. I enjoy his books. And I'm not saying Hornby is not a serious person. But his transformations are a bit too black and white, the emotional climaxes too easy. I feel he's decided on a particular means of crowd-pleasing, tackling important ideas and then taking them down a notch or two. How to Be Good is just the kind of book the punters would vote for."

The marital strife at the heart of How to Be Good is certainly a reflection of what Hornby himself has been through with his divorce from Virginia Bovel, a healthcare administrator, whom he married shortly after Fever Pitch came out. The process was as civilised as is possible under the circumstances, and they remain near-neighbours in north London, sharing in Danny's upbringing. Hornby now lives with Amanda Posey, who worked on the production of the Fever Pitch film.

Autism has acquired an eloquent spokesman in Hornby. He recently entered the debate over the MMR jab, which many parents of autistic children hold responsible for the condition.

He has had battles with his local council over provision for autistic children. He has used his position to fundraise, helping to organise a benefit concert in 2000 and in the same year editing a collection of stories, Speaking with the Angel, from which proceeds also went to support research. Among the contributors to the book was the author Robert Harris, who is married to Hornby's sister Gill.

Meanwhile, Hornby has maintained a level of normality in his life, "showing a steely resolve when faced with the pressures of celebrity", as one friend puts it, "and exaggerated restraint in his personal style".

For a while he was good friends with John Cusack, the star of the film of High Fidelity, but the entree to Hollywood has not meant abandoning old mates in favour of richer and more famous new ones.

It's been an astonishing 10 years, in which Hornby's influence on contemporary culture has been profound.

Football's moneyed era was based on the rise of a new middle-class audience, a process which Fever Pitch helped usher in. And from countless Fever Pitch imitations to the Tony Parsons best-seller Man and Boy, Hornby has changed literature, too.

But the best way the anniversary could be marked would be for Arsenal to win the double. And that's only three games away.

- INDEPENDENT