A New Shelf Life Begins

'Tugging at Your Soul'

When Hornby was Sam's age, he had been an Arsenal fan for nearly five years and was starting to develop an equivalent obsession with music. The latter, he once estimated, would cause him to attend maybe a thousand live concerts over 30 years -- 900 featuring bands playing "lifeless and inferior versions of their albums through crappy PA systems," the others leaving him "exhilarated, inspired, electrified."

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He lives in north London now, but he grew up middle class in suburban Berkshire. Like Sam's, his parents were divorced, and "Fever Pitch" is in part about Hornby's discovery that he could connect with his otherwise absent father through football.

"There is a strong melancholy streak in Nick," says Penguin's Tony Lacey, who edits his adult books in England. "You feel a lot of the engagement with football and music is keeping melancholy at bay."

Hornby started to think about writing when he was around 19, but he had an idealized image of writers and "was afraid to compete with these people." When he finally took the plunge into journalism, "a couple of editors said, 'You're competing with nothing at all. We're desperate for people who turn copy in on time and it's clean.' "

Eventually, he published enough clean copy to attract the interest of an agent, a "quite posh middle-aged English lady." Hornby had two book ideas, "Fever Pitch" and what would become "High Fidelity."

"She won't get the football book," he thought, so he started trying to pitch "an unwritten novel that actually has no plot anyway. You find yourself burbling very, very quickly." Thinking he was about to get thrown out, he switched to the Arsenal memoir.

"Oh, I'll sell that," she said.

"Fever Pitch" became "quite a big deal," Hornby says, still sounding surprised. But he didn't have long to revel in its success, because the birth of his son Danny followed, and "it was immediately apparent that things weren't going to be right with him."

Danny turned out to be profoundly autistic. Now 14, he's doing well -- "he's pretty much all of the time incredibly happy, happier than any of us," Hornby says -- but he will always need care.

Hornby was two decades older than Sam when having a child changed his life. Otherwise, both cases fit his description of the stories he likes to tell: "I'm looking for people in very ordinary situations in cities, whose lives get bent out of shape by something kind of big happening to them."

What draws readers isn't only that Hornby writes about people with whom it's easy to identify. It's that he tells their stories, as Catherine O'Brien put it recently in the London Times, "in a way that makes you laugh out loud while tugging at your soul."

Where did he learn this?