A Conversation with Nick Hornby

Why a book about suicide? What provoked your interest in the subject, and in this particular treatment of it?

I’m not sure that this is a book about suicide – in fact, I know it’s not. I don’t want to give too much away, but a book about suicide would have some suicides in it, and…Well, this one does, and it doesn’t. My interest in the book’s initial set-up came because I wanted a chance to look at people who have hit rock bottom, at least in terms of morale. And then I wanted to find a way of leading them – literally – back from the edge, without being either sentimental or simplistic about it.

You became known for writing books from a young man’s point of view, then you wrote about a marriage from a woman’s point of view, and now you’re writing from the point of view of four very different people. Why? Was this a conscious evolution or does it just reflect your changing interests and preoccupations?

There hasn’t yet been a conscious evolution – everything has felt like the next stop on the same train journey, even if it doesn’t necessarily look that way immediately. But I think writers do get frustrated with the amount they are able to bite off, especially early on in their careers. You want to write about the whole of life, but of course that’s beyond all of us, so you choose this little patch that you think you can handle in a novel. And then you get more confident, and more ambitious….Even so, I still feel that I’m at the beginning of a career, in terms of what I know. What I’m looking for, all the time, is a narrative idea that will accommodate many different tones, including comedy. I’m pleased with A Long Way Down in that sense.

You’re a very well-known figure in Britain – something of a celebrity, in fact, who gets approached on the street and asked for autographs. One of your characters is a television morning show host who also gets acknowledged on the street, although not in a very complimentary way. Is Martin the absolute nightmare vision of contemporary celebrity?

Writers are never celebrities, not really. I’d bet that even JK Rowling, surely the most famous writer in the world now, and certainly the most successful, can shop in her local supermarket without being recognized too often. Every now and again someone stops me, but very rarely – they’ve only got a dust-jacket photo and a couple of TV interviews to go on. Certainly my life hasn’t been made unbearable! But Martin’s different. Like a lot of contemporary celebrities, he has no discernible talent beyond what must have been a tenacious desire to remain in the media glare. And when you’re out of that glare, life comes unraveled pretty fast, I suspect. Those people are a human version of plants – they need the spotlight to live.

JJ, the young American who wants to be a rock star and falls short, recalls the guys from High Fidelity and About a Boy who helped make you famous. He’s deeply affected by pop music, and by books, and very knowledgeable about them, as you are. What’s his role in the novel? Is he a kind of incarnation of your former self, a visit to your lost youth?

It’s the not making it that interested me, more than the music and the books, even – it was so easy to imagine myself washed up at 35 (especially as I was exactly that age when my first book was published). I was certainly frightened, when I was 30 or 31 and failing to become a writer, that there was no way back to a conventional career, and I was going to spend my life poor and frustrated and unhappy. I had a college degree, though. JJ’s bright, and talented, but formally uneducated and unqualified – that gap between what you’re capable of and what you’re actually allowed to do is terrifying.

Jess, the youngest character, is also the most outrageous, the least articulate, and perhaps the most enigmatic. Who is she to you?

I’m not sure, but I keep being drawn to these young, tough, wild girls – there was one in About A Boy, too. I like her ungovernability and her lack of socialization – or rather, I’m interested in it. And of course people with that kind of energy are fantastic to write about. The energy rubs off.

All of the characters ultimately decide to go on living, at least for another six months, but they make it clear that this is not some neat, inspirational story of self-help and redemption. They all have a long way to go. But what is it that lets them go on? Is it seeing themselves clearly, and having others accept them as they are?

I’m not sure that they see themselves clearly. Without going into details, they all find something to cling to – even if, in some cases, the thing that’s keeping them afloat is not something that we would choose for ourselves. The point is that it floats, not that it’s pretty, or useful, or that it makes any sense. You don’t ask a plank of wood to make sense if you need to cling to it. The hope is, I suppose, that it might allow them to drift into shallower, calmer waters.

Maureen talks about the stories we tell to keep ourselves going. Would that be the function of fiction?

For me, it should be the function of everything - music, books, films, the works. I am mystified by the way we have allowed serious culture to be hijacked by people who effectively tell us, over and over again, that we should kill ourselves. My theory is that to over-compensate for the comparatively glamorous, fulfilled, and pleasant lives they lead, creative people feel they have to tell us that life is nasty, brutish and short; I feel that too many of the world’s population know that already. The art that means the most to me is the art that is redemptive.

All four of your characters have spiritual yearnings, but Maureen is explicitly religious – Catholic, in fact. She even quotes at one point from the Psalms of Jewish and Christian Scripture. How vital a force is religion in contemporary culture?

It depends how you define culture… Most contemporary Western writers, for example, are a pretty godless lot, myself included, so religion plays less of a part in contemporary fiction than perhaps it should, when you think about what kind of a role it plays in contemporary life. After all, we’re living in fear at the moment because of the current war between born-again Christians and Muslim extremists. My generation’s attitude could probably best be summarized as ‘A Plague on both your houses,’ and it’s probably not good enough.

You’re a British writer who visits America often and knows this country fairly well. How have you seen this country change in recent years? Is there a growing rift between America and the rest of the world?

Well, there is -- there’s certainly a lot of ill-feeling in Europe towards the US government and the people who voted for it -- but you’d never know it if you’re a writer. You do readings, and meet nice, concerned, liberal people who feel embarrassed – in fact, I’ve never felt closer to Americans than I have these last couple of years. Maybe the East Coast of the US will snap off and float across the Atlantic, and the West Coast will drift off towards Australia…That just leaves the problem of Chicago.

How do you see your fiction evolving from this point? Are you working on another novel?

The rhythm of the last few years means that I’ve tended not to start another book before the paperback of the current book is out -- there’s too much to do in the first year of a book’s life, too much travel and talking. So I haven’t started anything yet. As for evolution…. I just want to get better at what I do. So I’ll try and find a story and some characters that will suit this ambition.

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