Few genres escape Nick Hornby's attention in this collection of effusive essays for a US magazine
That unstuffy word "stuff" establishes right away Nick Hornby's goal in this collection of literary journalism: to discuss books from the point of view of a middle-aged bloke who lives in the "real world", unlike the "scary critics" on the "posh papers".
Books are part of life in the fullest sense here: Hornby barely reads a line if his kids are off school or when the World Cup's on. Otherwise, he wolfs them down oblivious to genre, publication date or coolness (a metric he loathes). Celine Dion, marriage and how to turn Colm Tóibín's novel Brooklyn into a screenplay are among topics considered in a month-by-month diary of his intake.
Hornby's authority as a critic comes from pretending he has none, a trick open to abuse. In suggesting that young adult fiction warrants more attention, he cites David Almond's "extraordinary" Clay , which he read just before an adult novel "that was meretricious, dishonest, pretentious, disastrously constructed and garlanded with gushing reviews… the best readers had spoken".
But he doesn't name the novel, maybe because these columns first ran in the Believer , a US magazine whose writers must be nice "or say nothing at all". The effect is to forestall argument – something Hornby generally disdains, as when he rather impatiently says Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is "a great book, yet someone, somewhere, won't like it, and will say so somewhere". You know what he means – one-upmanship is a mug's game – yet perhaps disagreement does as much as enthusiasm to keep books alive.
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