Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby has been so successful at translating popular enthusiasms – music, football – into well-regarded literature that he stirs the envy of those who are theoretically in favour of such a project but don’t want to see anybody getting paid for it. But the acknowledgement of commercial reality has always been one of Hornby’s themes. In his novel High Fidelity, there is a clear conflict between the record-shop owner who wants to sell records to the public and the fanatical assistant who would rather that nobody bought them. Hornby raised no objections – on the contrary – when, for the American movie versions, High Fidelity was transferred from London to Chicago and Fever Pitch became a story about being mad about the Red Sox instead of about Arsenal. The dislocations added to his experience and fed back into his work, which can be said to centre on the principle that it takes a long time for a man to grow up, and it sometimes takes a child to show him how. Such powers of reflection would have made him an important essayist on popular culture even if he had never written a novel. As the New Yorker’s popular music critic he was often called conservative because he liked only the stuff that sounded good. Being subtle on subjects that everybody thinks they know about already is harder than it looks, but Hornby proves, even in conversation, that he has the essential requirement: honesty about his own reactions.