A New Shelf Life Begins

Roddy Doyle and Anne Tyler had a lot to do with it, he says.

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He read "The Commitments," "The Snapper" and "The Van" -- Doyle's first three books, set among the Irish working class -- soon after they started coming out in the late '80s. "They're so simple, they're so complicated, they're so sad, they're so funny," Hornby says. And he loved Tyler's ability, in such books as "The Accidental Tourist" and "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant," to toggle seamlessly between humor and heartache.

You can't talk about Hornby's writing without talking about his humor, says novelist Vendela Vida -- and she should know. Vida recruited Hornby to write a column, Stuff I've Been Reading, for the Believer, the literary monthly she co-edits, and now finds herself relentlessly mocked as part of what Hornby calls "the Polysyllabic Spree, the 365 beautiful, vacant, scary young men and women who edit this magazine."

Lately, they have been treated to a dose of Hornby's new obsession: a whole category of books invisible to the grown-up literary world.

'A Previously Ignored Room'

When Michael Cart was asked to put together a YA panel at last summer's American Library Association conference in Washington, Hornby was the first person he invited. Cart, a former librarian who now writes, lectures and consults about books for young adults, had read an advance copy of "Slam" and thought it was "absolutely terrific."

At the conference, Cart and others bombarded him with the names of YA favorites. Hornby says it was a "culture-changing trip."

"I've discovered a previously ignored room at the back of the bookstore that's filled with masterpieces," he told his Believer readers.

He went bonkers over "Skellig," by David Almond, which he called "one of the best novels published in the last decade" and described as "the beautifully simple and bottomlessly complicated story of a boy who finds a sick angel in his garage, a stinking, croaking creature who loves Chinese takeaways and brown ale." He moved on to YA works by Francesca Lia Block, Philippa Pearce, Toby Barlow and Gene Luen Yang.

These days, he says, he walks around asking "Does anyone know who Robert Cormier is?" in the same way people in his generation used to ask "Has anyone ever heard of this Vonnegut guy?"

The YA expert isn't surprised.

Hornby has "an intrinsic feel for teenage literature," Cart says. What's more, over the past decade and a half, as the number of YA books has exploded, the average age of the protagonists has risen from 14 to 17 and the term "young adult" has expanded to include readers "as old as 25."

Really? How does that work in bookstores?