DIARY
NICK HORNBY
Tony Hancock, Bret Easton Ellis, Joan- na Trollope, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Roddy Doyle, Barry Levinson, P.G. Wode- house, Elizabeth Hurley, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Irvine Welsh, J.D. Salinger, Adrian Mole, Quentin Tarantino. . . If you invited that lot round for dinner, the seating plan would require an enormous amount of attention. (A tip: keep Tarantino away from P.G. Wodehouse.) Yet these names have all been rubbing shoulders recently in reviews of my new book, and I am now trying to understand what some of them were doing there. The comparison with Elizabeth Hurley, for example, is particularly puzzling. Was it my looks or my prose style? I rather suspect that it might have been the lat- ter. I would love to read a book that was reminiscent of all these people, but I'm sure that mine is not it, so why were they roped in?
Julian Barnes recently said in an inter- view that if two reviews came to violently different conclusions about the same book, then the author should believe neither one nor the other, and you can see his point: it is, one would have thought, impossible to be Joanna Trollope, queen of the Aga saga, and Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, simultaneously. But Barnes's obser- vation is borne from wisdom and maturity, and I am neither mature nor wise, at least when it comes to reviews, so my modus operandi is somewhat different. I try to believe every word of the good notices, in which the fingerprint of genius is clearly visible, and convince myself that the bad ones have been written by idiots. It was hard at first, but I am beginning to get the hang of it now.
One of the most interesting reviews appeared, perhaps inevitably, in the Lon- don Review of Books, where Jenny Turner was hard but fair, positive and negative, encouraging and dismissive. She drew attention to an essay by David Lodge in which he makes an interesting distinction between the modern and the contemporary novel: 'modern' novelists are the proper writers, the ones who write for posterity, and as a consequence it is their fate to be misunderstood and undervalued during their lifetimes; 'contemporary' writers, in which category I belong, apparently, are destined to be wildly over-praised on Publication and then forgotten about. Being wildly over-praised and then for- gotten about sounds great to me, I'm afraid to say — people can overpraise me all they want, and I won't utter a word of protest. 0 iie of the people who reviewed my book was Suzanne Moore (fingerprint of genius clearly visible), the recent victim of an unpleasant assault by Germaine Greer. But I would have leaped to her defence anyway — Moore is a fine columnist and an endless reservoir of good, liberal common- sense. It seems to me to be almost beyond belief that anyone who doesn't belong to the stuffiest sort of gentleman's club can criticise someone for the way that she speaks, as Greer is supposed to have done: who really cares about a few 'y'knows' as long as the sentences they punctuate are interesting and intelligent? Very few peo- ple with Moore's background — she left school at 16 but studied for a degree as a mature student, and is a single mother end up writing columns in broadsheet newspapers and more's the pity; Greer's snobby insults make her sound like a retired minor public school headmaster (and public schools are very good at taking the 'y'knows', along with the capacity to produce an original thought, out of most of their pupils) rather than one of the leading thinkers of her generation. I hope that when the world has passed my by, and it is other, younger men who are being com- pared to Elizabeth Hurley and Joanna Trollope on the literary pages, I will have the good grace to accept it. Greer's rage `By the time I've worked my hours, I'm too tired for any industrial action.' seems from this distance to have very little to do with lipstick, or hysterectomies, or accents, and everything to do with youth and age.
What did we do before Waterstone's, those of us who were brought up outside London? I don't mean the question rhetor- ically; I really can't remember. In my home town there was a W.H. Smith's and a small local bookshop that sold stationery, dictio- naries and recipe books, as well as the odd Catherine Cookson paperback, if you were lucky. Anything more recherché and we had to go to Foyle's or Dillon's by train and tube. The fact that Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, William Boyd, Sebastian Faulks and other literary novelists are now regarded as part of the mainstream, major authors who shift hundreds, of thousands of books, is in part due to the general availability of their books in our high streets; it was a bit of a drag having to travel 30-odd miles to buy them, and Waterstone's success with them has forced other chains to stock them. I have just finished a Waterstone's tour, and was struck once again by just how pleasant, enthusiastic and knowledgeable the staff are; I am one of the very many writers whose books would be more or less unpub- lishable without their backing. I have caught one or two people being sniffy about what they see as the chain's middle- brow good taste and its ambience of mid- dle-class preciousness, but these people have very short memories. One day they will wake up to find that Waterstone's have gone, vanished, and they will have to order their copies of the new E. Annie -Proulx ('Who? Sorry, dear') from the John Men- zies at their nearest railway station.
Amost Spectator readers are probably aware by now, I am the proud holder of the Golden Statto, the trophy awarded to the winner of BBC2's Fantasy Football League. I held off a late challenge from the actress Patsy Kensit, who finished second, and Alan Hansen, the former Liverpool and Scotland central defender, came a dismal fourth. I was awarded the trophy by Wilf Mannion, who played for Middlesbrough and England during the 1940s, and who is now in his early 80s. 'He's bald!' Mannion said to one of the producers after he had made the presentation, and the producer concurred. (It is true that I don't have as much hair as some.) 'But he can't be!' Man- nion went on. 'He's only 19!' For some rea- son — possibly it was the athletic way I leaped up the steps to receive the cup — he had got me muddled up with the young Spurs player Nick Barmby.• Elizabeth Hur- ley, Nick Barmby — my cup runneth over.
Previous page
