Nick Hornby Tries to Teach Us "How to Be Good"

The Denver Post

August 19, 2001

By Dylan Foley
Special to The Denver Post

Nick Hornby's new novel, "How to Be Good" (Riverhead, 305 pages, $24.95), has caused a stir in the British press. Gone are the immature young men from his best sellers "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy." Tabloids in London are distressed by Hornby's audacity to write in the voice of a woman, Katie Carr, a doctor who is flummoxed by her angry husband's conversion to goodness.

"Way too much has been made about the differences between men and women," said Hornby, dismissing the sexual-role hoopla over his new novel. "I live with a woman and I am very rarely mystified by what she does on the grounds of gender."

Hornby came to the U.S. from London recently for an arduous two-week tour. Though Hornby's American readings have attracted audiences as big as 600 people, he has remained as unflappable as the elementary schoolteacher he once was. In a chic Manhattan hotel lounge, the 43-year-old Hornby discussed his book and how it was influenced by his young son's autism.

"Ever since my son was diagnosed, I've been introduced to people I didn't know existed," said Hornby of the people who teach his 7-year-old son, Danny. "They are the most terrifyingly devoted, good people. It is like you cross the line into the place of pure goodness." Though Hornby routinely gave money to charity, he felt like he was on "a moral backfoot."

His new acquaintances provoked Hornby to examine issues of faith and self-doubt. "I was interested in a person who felt secure that they were a good person, and to have that conviction rocked. I know I wanted to get this in the context of a marriage."

Katie, the heroine of "How to Be Good," is an overworked public health service doctor in North London. Her husband, David, is a frustrated novelist who vents against everything in a newspaper column titled "The Angriest Man in Holloway." Their dying marriage is rocked by Katie's adultery at the beginning of the novel, but David's conversion at the hands of the murky DJ GoodNews is more shattering for Katie and their two children.

"David reminds me of a lot of men," explained Hornby. "In the novel, I knew that I wanted a partner in this marriage to go from being cynical to intemperately good. It seemed to me more likely that it would be a guy that would be brutally disappointed with his life."

Hornby has created a novel that is both mercilessly funny and poignant. Katie is a fully developed character, tortured by the fact she can't cure many of her patients and guilty that she doesn't spend enough time with her two small children. David invites his guru GoodNews, who received his healing powers by consuming too much Ecstasy, to live with his family. First, David gives away a computer and many of the children's toys. "I was pinned back by the moral force of David's argument," said Katie of the computer, "but now I can see that he has gone mad, that he wants to humiliate us all. How could I have forgotten that this is what always happens with zealots? They always go too far."

But it is just the beginning - David and GoodNews draw up plans to save the world. Their first step is to put homeless (and possibly dangerous) teenagers in the spare bedrooms of all the houses on their upper-middle-class block. Civil war breaks out in the Carr household.

Along with the vivid prose that sets up the ironic events of the book, Hornby forces the reader to ask hard questions - how can we go in our middle-class lives when there is so much suffering around the world, or even down the block?

"I'd wanted to get people to side with Kate against sanctimony," said Hornby, "but on the other hand, not having her have answers to why she isn't doing this stuff." David's sanctimony, he says, at times tips into moral sadism. Katie finds herself missing the old, angry David. The creation of the GoodNews character was also related to Hornby's son. "When I started talking publicly about my son's condition," said Hornby, "every now and then I would get these weird letters from people: "Rub turnip juice on his head and stand him upside-down in a bucket of water. Come see me and I will cure him.' There is a lot of weird therapy stuff out there, and you are haunted by the idea that one of these people might have something. I liked the idea that someone unpromising had the gift. Katie, with her education and her desire, is denied any gift."

Last year, Hornby edited the successful short-story collection "Speaking With the Angel." The book contained original work by Helen Fielding, Roddy Doyle and Dave Eggers, all to raise money for two schools for autistic children, one in London and one in New York. Was this Hornby's attempt to be good? "It would be such a feeble attempt. It was so easy and so fun," he said with a laugh. "It cost me almost nothing. I only had to write my own story and my introduction."

Though the 43-year-old Katie is much more mature than the 30-ish boys in Hornby's two other novels, she has the same wry commentary on herself and those around her, like Rob in "High Fidelity." Whether it is the deranged minister who is "one wafer short of a communion" or her befuddled patient, Barmy Brian, Katie's beautiful wit keeps the momentum of the novel going. Katie is helpless in the face of her husband's oppressive goodness, until she pulls a subtle manipulation, hamstringing David's holiness and possibly saving the marriage.

The ending, however, is hardly clear. Katie and David have a lot of work to do to keep their family together. "I knew that I wanted the ending to be a bit tentative and a bit bleak," said Hornby. "You know, like the marriage is hanging on by a thread."

Dylan Foley is a book critic from Brooklyn, N.Y.

Nick Hornby’s Comic Take on Suicide in "A Long Way Down"

(This interview appeared in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in June 2005)

By Dylan Foley


Earlier this month, British writer Nick Hornby began his one-man American invasion to support his new book, “A Long Way Down”(Riverhead, $24.95), by setting himself up in a two-room suite at a hip New York City hotel for an interview marathon, with extra cigarettes, bottled water and coffee.

His fourth novel is a grim departure from the fractured romance of “High Fidelity” or the dysfunctional middle-class family in “How To Be Good,” being a black comedy about four people failing to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve and coping with the aftermath.

“I’ve been looking for a way to take things further, to make a novel that’s a bit darker and a bit funnier, to stretch what I do,” says Hornby, with a bemused smile on his face as he lit his first cigarette.

In the new novel, Hornby sets up the action quickly. Four people--a TV personality disgraced after a sex scandal, a foul-mouthed teenage punk, the mother of a disabled child and a failed American rock musician wind up on the roof of Topper’s House, a fictional tower in North London. Their chance meeting on the verge of suicide on December 31st stops them all from killing themselves for the time being, and they set up an awkward self-help group of four to decide whether they should live or die. Hornby tells the novel in four intertwined monologues.

“When I wrote a short story for the (2001) collection ‘Speaking with the Angel,’ I really enjoyed writing in a voice that was not a literary voice, but a speaking voice,” says Hornby, as his publicist hands him a large coffee. “That is how I conceived this, weaving four monologues together. I could almost see them as four people standing side by side on stage.”

Hornby made his potential jumpers be driven by circumstances, not depression. “I wanted to deal with four separate narratives, where the weight of their lives pushed them up to the roof,” he says. “They had problems that I was autobiographically interested in. For me, it was the opportunity to be soulful, funny and painful within 300 pages.”

“I don’t really see this book as different,” Hornby says. “I always feel like each book is a station on the same track. I feel they are utterly consistent, traveling on this path.”

“Fever Pitch,” Hornby’s memoir of soccer fanaticism, put him on the literary map in England in 1992. “High Fidelity” in 1995 and the success of “About a Boy” in 1998, his wry and somewhat bleak novels about tortured human relations with a bit of hope mixed in, earned him a firm place on the lower tiers of the American bestseller lists. Hornby has branched out to other areas in his writing, such as writing on the 31 songs that changed his life in “Songbook” (2003) and literary criticism in “The Polysyllabic Spree”(2004).

Hornby says that he is not concerned with joining the pantheon of major literary bestsellers like Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen. “I have the money I need for my purposes, and I write the books that I want to write,” he says. “I don’t feel pressure in anyway, in any aspect of my professional life.”

Riverhead, Hornby’s publisher, has high hopes for the new book. They are shipping an astonishing 175,000 hardcovers of “A Long Way Down,” very unusual for a literary novel.

Unlike other authors who grumble about book tours, Hornby finds them fulfilling. “The American readings have been really good,” says Hornby, who will tour from Boston to San Francisco for 11 days in July. “When you get hundreds of people to a reading, it becomes a motivation in itself. They are grueling, but there are a lot of highs for me on American book tours. You don’t get people to come out at home.”

To create the very different suicidal main characters, Hornby looked into his own experiences. For Martin, the TV host who sleeps with a 15-year old, is sent to prison and loses his job and family, Hornby tapped into the strange attention he’s gotten as a minor celebrity in London. For Maureen, the mother of a severely handicapped son, he crafted her out of the emotions he experienced when caring for his own autistic son Danny, who is now 11, and meeting the stressed parents of other handicapped kids.

“I never met a flesh-and-blood Maureen,” says Hornby. “What I had was the experience of meeting parents who were frightened and desperate. I’ve isolated the feelings involved and I’ve spun out a character who dramatically it exemplifies those feelings.”

Despite three bestselling novels, Hornby is a refreshingly candid and unpretentious interview subject. He admits that the character of J.J., the 31-year-old failed American rock musician, was closest to a young Nick Hornby. “When I was in my late 20s , early 30s,” Hornby chuckles, “it was easily my worst time, in terms of morale. I was teaching at a language school when I needed money, which was pretty frequently. I was getting to the point in my life where I wondered whether I could by a decent coat, let alone a house. I felt like I was walking the plank and couldn’t go back. It was my own despair that informed the character.

Much has changed for Hornby since his thirties, and even in the last four years, since his last bestselling novel, “How to Be Good.” He lives in his beloved North London with his girlfriend Amanda Posey, and they now have two sons under the age of three. He has also just finished a comedy screenplay with the actress Emma Thompson.

Hornby himself has no doubts that even such success and happiness will not stop him from producing his darkly comic novels.

“I have a melancholic personality,” says Hornby, “ that will probably never go away, no matter what happens. The other thing is that Danny is a good source of darkness, because bad things can happen. I wouldn’t change my experience with Danny for the world, but there is still a hard core of difficulty that cannot be reduced any further.”