Hornby's new novel touches on sensitive issue

Nick Hornby

Even best-selling authors get nervous. Ask British writer Nick Hornby just how nervous, and he laughs nervously.

"It manifests itself by vowing never to write again," he says of pushing a new book out into the world. Then there's a repeat performance from his muted, nervous chug of a chuckle.

Fear of failure, is what I was thinking. And with hits such as Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About A Boy, with five million books sold so far, with three of his books now movies and another with the film rights just sold, there is, you'd think, only one way for him to go at the cash registers.

But that isn't what makes him jumpy. No, what makes him nervous is the wait for publication and then talking — and over the past couple of months he's talked and talked and talked about the damn thing before it has even hit the shops.

"It's what women say about childbirth I think — you forget what it was like between each one and, in fact, you actually come to look forward to it. Then when you're in the middle of it, you think, 'that's it, I remember what it was like now and I mustn't ever forget again', which means I'm not ever going to write again.

"But it passes after a few days. When the book starts to be in shops and you're doing readings and meeting people who it was intended for, then it gets a lot better.

"I'm sort of aware of which way I'm going for the rest of my career." That laugh again. "But I think as long I'm happy with the quality of the books then I can't worry about the rest of it. In a way, being a bestselling author is a freakish thing and I think you can't let that dictate your view of what you have written."

But I can't help thinking he should be a little nervous about his new book, A Long Way Down (Penguin/Viking, $35). His fourth novel is certainly pure Hornby: chatty, funny and chock full of self-loathing characters. It is also about suicide. Or rather, it begins with four strangers, who end up on the roof of a tower block known as Toppers House on the same New Year's Eve, intending to commit suicide. With an audience less than conducive to such a private act, all four step back from the edge and the remainder of his yarn has them coping with the aftermath.

So a suicide book with jokes then. A bit risky I'd say.

"It felt so much like my sort of material. I didn't ever think I was sort of doing anything that could be perceived as risky. Partly, it isn't a book about suicide. That's the thing — these four people never do it. The closest they come is in the first three or four pages and then everything after that really takes them further away.

"I didn't feel like I was having to force anything when I was thinking about it. It all felt organic. I think maybe the risk would come in if I thought to myself: 'Right, I want to write about these four suicide cases,' and: 'Oh, I know, I'll put some jokes in.' It didn't feel like that."

But it does read a little like that. Indeed the set-up is such a contrivance the rest of the book, written not in chapters but in each of the character's voices, feels something like a exercise in how to write yourself out of such a jacked-up beginning.

However, at just 250 pages of his light breezy style, it hardly outstays its welcome. And it is yet another fine study in a genre he has made his own. Some have called it lads' lit. Others have said his is the comedy of depression. However, I tell him, his schtick seems more like happy miserablism to me.

He laughs: "My people tend not to be the happiest people in the world; I don't know how you categorise that. A Long Way Down has got depression in the sense of the medical condition, that's for sure."

From High Fidelity's Rob to his latest quartet, Hornby's characters are certainly gloomy sods. But at the same time, each of his books seems to be required reading for blokes of a certain age and demeanour. I wonder aloud if the low-level depression that plagues his characters is simply the human condition by another name, and that's what draw so many readers?

"Exactly. So often I'm being told that my characters are losers or dysfunctional. It always makes me laugh because sometimes it's [by] a journalist who you know or you know something about and you think, 'You're not dysfunctional?'

"It always seems to be that the people who set themselves up to criticise the characters in that way, if they are trying to put the characters down, that they're doing it from a lofty position they themselves cannot occupy. In other words I think we are all dysfunctional in some way and yet that kind of low-level dysfunction isn't reflected in fiction."

Indeed modern fiction that has any ambition is terribly off-putting, well most of it, he says. And we are in the unfortunate situation where most people feel it's their duty to read and then feel guilty about not reading, rather than it being something that they want to do by choice.

"That's the gap I really hope to be filling, where people want to pick up the book because they want to find out what happens next and because it's making them laugh and maybe moving them. Those are the books I prize myself and the books I find hardest to get hold of. I think it is a lot better now. But I still think — and I'm not talking about me here — I think it's a very hard thing to do well, to write about the modern world with a light touch but not feel like you're slipping into some genre or other."

Just into happy miserablism, that's all.