A New Shelf Life Begins
To Find Nick Hornby's Latest Novel, 'Slam,' You Have to Think Young

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 11, 2007

When you're at lunch with newly minted young adult novelist Nick Hornby on an autumn afternoon in Washington, it seems appropriate to begin with a simple question:

What the heck is he doing here during the football season?

Hornby, who's British, is mainly known on these shores as the best-selling author of fiction such as "High Fidelity" and "How to Be Good." But he began his book-writing career with "Fever Pitch," a memoir about his lifelong passion for football. By this, of course, he means the game North Americans quaintly call "soccer," especially as played by the north London club Arsenal, with whom Hornby fell in love at age 11 and whose matches he still attends religiously.

He's in the United States for two weeks. Isn't Arsenal playing? Won't he miss games ?

"Three," he says ruefully. But his American publisher has "very sweetly" identified bars in three cities where he can at least watch them on TV.

He's making the sacrifice to talk up "Slam," the first novel he's aimed specifically at a young adult audience. His task has been complicated, Hornby says, by the fact that he's still not sure precisely what a YA book is.

He's not alone.

The notion of what constitutes YA literature has changed a good deal over the past 15 years or so, and it remains in flux. To complicate matters, there are those at Hornby's own publishers who'd have preferred to send "Slam" into the world simply as the latest Hornby, leaving younger readers to discover it for themselves.

Never mind that for now, though. For "young adult" takes on another meaning when you get to know Hornby even a little.

Sure, he's 50 years old and looks it. And yeah, he's got a happy second marriage, three children he loves and a serious career.

But Nick Hornby is also a man who's tried to retain as much as possible -- and shouldn't we all? -- of the fraught, joyful intensity that comes with lack of age.

'A Sort of Guardian Angel'

Hornby's work has always attracted a lot of young readers. Characters such as Rob, the music obsessive in "High Fidelity," or the responsibility-averse Will in "About a Boy" are caught in what their creator calls "that kind of interregnum" between 19 and 35 when society tolerates their unwillingness to "grow up in the conventional sense."

The world he creates in "Slam" doesn't feel that different. And when he describes moments such as nearly 16-year-old Sam's first encounter with his scarily gorgeous girlfriend, it's hard not to feel that Hornby has been through precisely the same thing in the quite recent past.

"Slam" happened in part because an English editor who admired his work asked if he'd ever thought of writing a YA book. He hadn't.

Then one day he noticed "a very, very young couple pushing a buggy around." He thought he knew her story, "because there's so much coverage of teenage mums. But the boy being there kind of took me aback a bit. So I started thinking about him. "

Before long he was having a coffee with the editor, Francesca Dow of Puffin Books. He had an idea for a novel about a boy who gets his girlfriend pregnant and talks it over with the sports hero in a poster on his wall -- "a sort of guardian angel," Dow says, though not one who intervenes to protect you. Might that be the kind of YA thing she was after?

Yes indeed.

The sports hero was originally going to be former Arsenal star Thierry Henry, but Hornby began to doubt that a kid today would have that kind of intimate relationship with a soccer player. The game has become "Nike-ized and corporate," he says, and so expensive that the average age of spectators at top division matches is now 43.

He chose Tony Hawk instead.

Hawk, in case you're too ancient to know, is the greatest skateboarder who ever lived. Or, rather, the greatest skater, for as the board-obsessed Sam explains right away, "we never say skateboarding."

Why a skater?

"Weirdly, I have a poster of Tony Hawk," Hornby says. "He did an American library campaign a few years ago where sports stars were asked to be photographed with their favorite books and he chose 'High Fidelity.' "

Reading Hawk's autobiography, Hornby realized that he wouldn't even have to invent the skater's part of the dialogue in Sam's conversations with him: Hawk's own words would do nicely.

He got in touch with Hawk and asked if he'd mind having his life story appropriated.

'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."

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?

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

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?

Cart laughs.

"Not too well yet," he says. "That's a big problem. Typically, booksellers like to put things into neat little categories." His question for publishers: "Why don't they do simultaneous editions?"

The answer, he thinks, is that "it's a territorial matter." If you're the head of an imprint, whether adult or juvenile, you want to control the latest Hornby because it will improve your bottom line.

Ask Hornby and his YA publishers what the difference is between Nick Hornby, fledgling YA novelist, and Nick Hornby, best-selling adult writer, and they'll make a number of points:

¿ The main characters in "Slam," as is true in almost every YA title, are teens themselves.

¿ Hornby reined in his use of profanity somewhat.

¿ "Slam" includes sequences in which Sam is projected into the future, the sort of "Twilight Zone, graphic novely type of idea," Hornby says, that he might not have tried in an adult book.

Ask Hornby's adult publishers, however, and they'll tell you that there are way more similarities than differences between Adult Nick and YA Nick -- and that Adult Nick sells more books.

Riverhead's Geoff Kloske, who publishes the adult Hornbys in the United States, is relatively circumspect. "There's no reason 'Slam' couldn't have been published as an adult book," Kloske says, but he and his colleagues agreed that "it was not a problem" to market it as YA. Still, "a certain segment of Nick's fans just are not going to be in that part of the bookstore."

Lacey, the English editor, is more blunt.

"I would like to have done this as an adult book," he says. "I think it would have done really well." As it is, "we've got out about 40,000 in hardback," great for most authors but not close to what an adult Nick Hornby would have done.

Even Hornby -- who bought into the idea of YA publication because he really wanted to reach teens -- admits to some doubts.

"I go into bookstores," as he put it in an e-mail, "and see 'Slam' next to board books and (if I'm lucky) Harry Potter, and I know the kind of kids I was aiming for wouldn't look twice at a book kept in the kids' section of a bookstore."

Still, everyone involved expresses confidence that "Slam" will be around for a while.

And hey: The paperback will be marketed to both young people and adults, just as Cart suggests.

'A Blank Sheet of Paper'

Both young and adult: It sounds like shorthand for Hornby himself.

One minute he'll be describing the insanity of the grown-up work world, including a day job he once had with the Korean electronics firm Samsung. Mostly he helped managers negotiate the mysteries of England, especially when Samsung's impatient chairman phoned in a request.

"I'd go in at 10, they'd say, 'We need to buy an equestrian center!' " he says, cracking up. "And then at lunchtime they'd say, 'Have you bought the equestrian center?' "

A minute later, you'll find him musing that after "a long process of ironing out kinks," his life feels "pretty straightforward now." You could use a word like "mature" to describe this second Nick Hornby, and you wouldn't be wrong.

You'd still be missing something essential, though.

To understand what, it helps to see Hornby onstage with the members of the Philadelphia rock band Marah, whom he befriended a few years back. "Youth is a quality not unlike health: It's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it," he once wrote in an essay explaining why he'd been so drawn to Marah's throwback exuberance.

Now here he is, courtesy of YouTube, warming up the crowd at a joint Hornby/Marah gig last year in London.

He tells them about the 1972 Rory Gallagher concert that turned him into a live music fan; evokes the bygone ear-bleed era when "if you had been to a show on Saturday and you could still hear the feedback the following Wednesday, then you were the envy of your friends"; and explains why nostalgia is not really the point.

He knows he can't top the mind-altering impact of that 1972 concert, because "I was a blank sheet of paper that year, and I was being written on for the first time."

And yet . . .

There may not be much room left on that once-blank page -- but that doesn't mean he never wants to be written on again.

"Okay, Marah," the young, adult Hornby says. "Make some noise."