Fan in the limelight

By David L. Ulin

June 15, 2005 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

NEW YORK — Nick Hornby’s room at the W Hotel in Union Square looks, well, lived in. On the desk, a laptop nestles amid a nest of wires, surrounded by loose stacks of papers and books. Atop the coffee table, meanwhile, three or four unopened cans of Guinness occupy a champagne bucket, whether leftover from the night before or in preparation for the one ahead, it’s not clear.

Hornby sits by the window in a blue T-shirt, smoking, his small ears sticking out from his shaved head like the handles of a jug. He’s here to kick off the American tour for his fourth novel, “A Long Way Down,” a black comedy about suicide, and this is Media Day. He’s just taken part in an author lunch at BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual trade show, sharing a dais with Simon Winchester, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Cunningham. While hundreds of booksellers and insiders ate banquet chicken deep in the belly of the Jacob Javits Center, Hornby discussed inspiration, lamenting the tendency of literary types to approach creativity as if it were some intangible windblown myth.

“I used to be a high school teacher, and I hated every minute of it,” he said to appreciative laughter. “That helps focus the mind a little bit. My inspiration is panic and fear.” It’s a refreshingly honest perspective, delivered with no affect; he’s just saying what he thinks.

This, of course, is a trademark of Hornby’s writing, from his novels to the three works of nonfiction that explore the elusive territory of identification and obsession, the way the things we love (sports, music, literature) make us who we are. As he hunkers down for a series of interviews, Hornby seems remarkably without agenda, a regular guy who has found himself, somewhat unexpectedly, in the spotlight, when all he ever really wanted to be was a fan.

Fanhood has been a driving force in Hornby’s work from the outset; his first book, “Fever Pitch,” charts his tempestuous relationship with the British soccer team Arsenal, using the team as a filter to get at issues of time and heritage and loss, while the novel “High Fidelity” tracks the influence of music on a record clerk distraught over the failure of love. “I think it’s still the thing that defines me,” Hornby acknowledges, “and, in fact, the real joy in my professional life is just being able to submerge myself in that stuff.”

‘Lad lit’

Yet this has also brought about a certain confusion as to his intentions, a misreading of his point of view. Over the years, Hornby has been tagged as a purveyor of “lad lit,” his characters maladjusted Peter Pans who refuse to grow up. More to the point, though, they are people -- mostly men, it’s true -- who, in the words of the late Lester Bangs, “glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for a prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since.”

This, Hornby suggests, is the true nature of fanhood, the way it brings us more directly in touch with an idealized sphere of existence, a heightened notion of ourselves. “In a way,” he says, taking a long drag off his cigarette, “I think it’s not healthy, because it makes you live life at possibly too high a pitch. One of the functions maybe that professional life serves is to act as a kind of padding or deadening so that you’re listening to this incredibly intense music, or reading an incredibly intense book, but you’re doing it after you’ve been dealing with naughty kids or trying to sell showerheads, or whatever. So I do think that being able to be a fan all day every day is possibly more emotionally draining than life was intended to be.”

“A Long Way Down” is a novel that begins at this point of emotional depletion, although it only deals with fanhood in a peripheral sense. The premise is simple: Four strangers cross paths on New Year’s Eve on the roof of Topper’s House, an infamous London suicide spot where they’ve come to kill themselves. For Martin, a disgraced television personality, death is better than seeing himself in the tabloids, or hosting a low-rent cable chat show. Maureen, on the other hand, can no longer bear her life as sole caregiver to her vegetative son, while J.J., a failed rock star, and Jess, a bitter 18-year-old, want to avoid the blank slate of a future that feels like “walking down a tunnel that was getting narrower and narrower, and darker and darker.”

It’s giving nothing away to report that the four derail each other’s attempts at self-destruction; instead, they form a little group, a secret society, in which suicide becomes a fiber of connection, the very thing that keeps them alive. The turning point comes when, while reuniting at Topper’s House, the four watch another man leap to his death. It’s a profound moment -- less because of what they’ve witnessed than the ensuing realization that they’re not capable of doing the same.

The point, Hornby says, is that, in its own way, suicide is an act of courage, requiring a determination most of us will never have. “It was really my personal journey with the book and my personal relationship with the theme,” he explains. “I’d always presumed that I could jump off the roof if things got too bad. But living with the book for quite a long time, and thinking about myself, made me realize that I’d kidded myself that it was an option. It is a fairly agonizing realization.”

Evolution of a writer

If all this sounds like something of a departure, perhaps it’s most accurate to call it a progression, an indication of how Hornby’s vision has grown. After years as a music critic, he stopped covering the subject in the wake of his 2003 book of essays, “Songbook,” which uses 31 pop songs, ranging from Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” to Richard and Linda Thompson’s “The Calvary Cross,” to explicate, in pastiche-like fashion, the effect of music on his inner life.

For the last 20 months, he has contributed a column to the Believer, a McSweeney’s spinoff, called “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” in which he catalogs his book-buying habits from the point of view of a reader, essentially reinventing criticism on a human scale. (The first 14 installments were collected last year in “The Polysyllabic Spree.”)

“The idea of critical posture,” Hornby says, “no longer makes much sense to me. It’s interesting because the Believer’s got this thing that you don’t trash books, and I was doing an interview once, and this writer asked, ‘Don’t you think writers of really bad books should learn to take it on the chin?’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s fine, if you can tell me, officially, what the really bad books are.’ ”

For all that, he has no problem arguing, as he does in “The Polysyllabic Spree,” that “[b]ooks are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go 15 rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.”

As to why this is, Hornby offers up a quick comparison. “I’m pretty sure that there are no great albums I haven’t heard, but we can read for the rest of our lives and not be disappointed. I still listen to an enormous amount of music, and I buy an enormous amount of music, but I don’t have as much invested in it. The books I have in my house that I haven’t read, I could just pull off the shelf and have an amazing time.”

In recent years, he’s been compelled by another form of literary engagement, using his work to help fund organizations in which he believes. The money he earns on “The Polysyllabic Spree” is being split equally by Dave Eggers’ 826NYC, a nonprofit tutoring and literacy center for kids, and TreeHouse, the North London school for autistic children that Hornby and his ex-wife helped establish in 1997 when their son Danny, who has the disorder, was 4.

“It would seem criminal,” Hornby says flatly, “not to give something. With ‘The Polysyllabic Spree,’ the Believer pays me for the column. Then my German editors saw it and said a German magazine wanted to buy it, and that also happened with an Italian magazine. So I’m paid three times for a column. Anyway, it’s a lot of fun giving money away.” Hornby grins, and takes another drag from his cigarette, and for a moment, you can see an irreverent glimmer in his eyes. At the same time, that irreverence comes mixed with a more nuanced sensibility, the idea that writing need not be so insular, after all.

“What I’m interested in now,” Hornby says, “is the idea that anyone who persists and tries to become some kind of artist is emotionally immature. It seems to me that the big passage to adulthood is accepting that you’re not special. As a kid, you think you are.

“And I’m not sure that people who want to see their name in print, or on a movie screen or in a gallery, have accepted that they’re not special.

“That’s not to say we don’t need artists, or that what they do isn’t valuable, because it is. But I think maybe at the heart of it, there’s a lack of acceptance. It’s sort of weird that these are the people we end up looking at to explain our world.”

Book readings

Where: Dutton’s Beverly Hills, 447 N. Canon Drive, Beverly Hills

When: 7 p.m. Thursday

Contact: (310) 281-0997

Also

Where: Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena

When: 7 p.m. Friday

Contact: (626) 449-5320

Also

Where: Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood

When: 2 p.m. Saturday

Contact: (310) 659-3110