Nick Hornby, Naked

Well, maybe just bald. (Speaking from experience, when the winter wind whips around one's tonsured head, it feels as if one is naked against the chill!)

NaBloPoMo Day 5: Towards the end of September, which feels like half a year ago, we saw Nick Hornby at Coolidge Corner Theater, the venue for those Booksmith author events expected to need extra seating capacity. We went with our friends Matt and Norah, big Hornby fans who have read most of his oeuvre. The theater was indeed packed; the age demographic was surprisingly broad -- young to old and fairly uniformly distributed, as best I could tell.

I've only read one of Hornby's books, High Fidelity, which I enjoyed considerably (not a bad movie, either), not least because I could glide through it in a few hours. There is something to be said for the writerly talent of making each page easy to turn without gumming up the sentences between with poorly constructed cruft. Like a knack for composing catchy pop melodies, it's not to be compared with the genius required for classical masterpieces, but nor is it anything to sneer at. Hornby has this talent, to be sure.


Hornby dressed casually, as though he were out to watch a football match, and he read breezily from his latest, Juliet, Naked. (New York Times review here.) It was thoroughly pleasurable to hear the text read, but I can't recall any of its content -- this is one of the hallmarks of Hornby's writing and my early onset Alzheimer's. Following the reading, Hornby took questions from the audience, and my chief, lasting impression is that he seems like a wholly amicable, pleasant, friendly, and witty but otherwise unremarkable person, the perfect barstool neighbor to share a few pints with. Most of the questions I can recall were posed by younger fans obviously ensorcelled by the desire to become writers themselves: questions about writing habits and inspiration. Having read enough "How to Become a Writer" books myself, I recognize such questions as signifiers of naivete and perhaps dilettantism. Novels, poems, dissertations, research statements, grant applications -- the fundamental ritual is applying ass to chair (hat tip, Richard Rhodes's How to Write). For the curious, Hornby has an office near an elementary school where he writes on a shiny new iMac. And he says writing screenplays is much easier than writing novels.

I liked the Nick Hornby who visited Brookline much more than the faceless author of ubiquitous paperbacks whom I had (not really) imagined before. When next fancy strikes and I have a free afternoon, I'll be more inclined to pick up another of Hornby's books for a few agreeable hours.