Money placed on Tony Blair staying in Downing Street after election day might reasonably be expected to net a (small) profit in 12 days. With even greater confidence, it is possible to identify a huge bestseller that will be published next week. This is not an act of clairvoyancy, more a statement of fact A new book by Nick Hornby is about to appear. Given his track record so far, the chances that How to be Good will bomb are roughly on a par with the chances that Hornby will suddenly declare that he has been a closet fan of Manchester United for the past 30 years There are few betting certainties in this world But some can still be found, if you search hard enough. Money placed on Tony Blair staying in Downing Street after election day might reasonably be expected to net a (small) profit in 12 days. With even greater confidence, it is possible to identify a huge bestseller that will be published next week. This is not an act of clairvoyancy, more a statement of fact A new book by Nick Hornby is about to appear.
Given his track record so far, the chances that How to be Good will bomb are roughly on a par with the chances that Hornby will suddenly declare that he has been a closet fan of Manchester United for the past 30 years. Let us take the story so far. First, in 1992, there was Fever Pitch (a north Londoner's life, football, and relationships), which became a publishing sensation, and was followed by a movie starring Colin Firth. High Fidelity (a north Londoner's life, pop music, and the trickiness of relationships) sold more than a million copies, and was followed by a movie starring John Cusack.About a Boy (a north Londoner's life, children, and the trickiness of relationships) sold more than a million copies; Robert De Niro's production company paid £2 million for the rights to a movie, now being filmed with Hugh Grant.And now, for his next trick. How to be Good is set in how did you guess? Holloway, north London. It is about decency, divorce and the trickiness of relationships.In some respects, this book seems to be a radical change from everything that came before. The previous books were seen from the confused perspective of boys, boys, boys How to be Good is told from the vantage point of a woman How un-Hornbyian is that? Answer: not very, perhaps.
There is the same wry self-observation sympathetic, self-pitying and mocking all at once. In Hornby's earlier books, the male narrator stands at a (sometimes blackly) comic distance to his own trials and tribulations; here, the female narrator does the same.It is notoriously foolish to seek to identify an author with his or her work And yet with Nick Hornby it is sometimes impossible not to. Partly, that is because his first work, Fever Pitch the obsessive life and times of a middle-class Arsenal fan was an autobiographical memoir. But in his two previous novels, it is equally tempting to see the amiable Hornby himself as sharing many traits with the main character.Hornby almost provokes us to do so, by setting all his work in the immediate area of his real-life home, around the corner from his beloved Arsenal; the unexciting Holloway Road in north London has a regular walk-on part.In How to be Good, the mantra phrase is "in this particular postcode" meaning Holloway and Highbury. Oddly, despite appearances and a few streetnames lobbed in to the text, there is little attempt in his books to describe the local mood, which may be one reason why the High Fidelity film transferred so effortlessly to Chicago, and why the books are so popular worldwide (in a Belgrade bookshop last month, I saw copies of Hornby's books piled high). In the latest book, there is an added poignancy for those seeking parallels with Hornby's own life, in that Hornby's marriage to Virginia Bovell broke up in 1998.
