A hoot and a treasure

This is a wonderful book — lucid, funny, sharp, truthful, cheeky, generous, erudite, surprise-crammed, and emanating a delicious tang of sophisticated amusement. I would love to continue in this vein but I’m afraid I mustn’t. It’s just not right. You see, the book is a collection of literary columns written by Nick Hornby for an American magazine. Each month he reflects on whatever he happens to have been reading, and the editor has given him absolute freedom to clodhop where he will across the sods of literature provided he utters no word against any author. The editor means it. When Hornby badmouths some writer by accident he gets sin-binned for a month as punishment. Hence my reluctance to write a kind review of this collection of kind reviews. Damn kindness! We writers are full of envy and hate, aren’t we? OK. Out come the knives.

I’ve followed Hornby’s career with half an eye (or perhaps a little more) since he emerged in the early Nineties. As I recall, his books have been about Arsenal, a record shop, a trustafarian and a teenager, some people on a ledge, and 31 tunes he rather liked. Perhaps I left out a couple of books there. Anyway, lousy materials, you’ll agree, so how has he built them into a career, no, an industry, worth tens of millions of pounds? The answer is literary marketing. Hornby has pondered the statistics wisely. Books are bought by women and men in the ratio of 7:3, so success depends on appealing to the 7 not the 3. Hence the peculiarly feminised air of Hornby’s novels (which I rate a fair bit lower than his non-fiction), which feel like extended acts of contrition for the author’s ineradicable sin of being male.