An Interview With Nick Hornby

Your books are so often about people who are obsessed with pop culture. You’ve certainly cemented your place in pop culture, in literature and in film, and I understand you’re writing a TV series in the UK. How does it feel to be someone whom fans can obsess about?

I'm not sure I'm the kind of person fans obsess about, not really. I think that I would need to be a little more oblique, and my work a little more opaque. I meet plenty of people who have read all the books and seem to like them, but none of these people have ever struck me as obsessive or deranged. The books speak for themselves - plus they have jokes in them. Jokes tend to kill mystique.

Juliet, Naked, your new book, features a Bob Dylan or Springsteen-like songwriter named Tucker Crowe. You have Crowe putting out one acclaimed album in the 1980s and disappearing quite suddenly from the public eye. It’s hard to picture a modern musician enigmatically dropping out of the public eye today. The day of the carefully crafted mix tape made lovingly in real time is over, and you’ve written about how MP3 blogs perform the same function as independent record shops. How do you think the changing nature of music has affected what it means to be a fan today?

Well music itself hasn't changed much, not yet, but becoming a fan has become a whole lot easier. Every single thing your favorite band has ever recorded is available for free in a box on your desk. The odd thing though, is that it looks to me as though this hasn't added to the sum total of music fans. The people who couldn't be bothered to walk down to their local independent store to explore new music can't be bothered to find mp3 blogs. It has, however, become easier to spend all day talking to people with exactly the same tastes as you. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

The Seattle Sounders FC played its inaugural home match this March and the city has been inundated with the green scarves of our own homegrown soccer fans. Have you been following American forays into soccer?

I'm afraid I haven't been following US soccer. Just as all the movie stars worth anything live in LA - or NYC, if they're particularly nonconformist - all the footballers worth watching play in Europe. That won't change for a while. So there isn't a great deal of interest in US soccer at home.

High Fidelity and About a Boy are about men who are having difficulty maturing (or integrating their hobbies with their responsibilities, to put it less judgmentally), and Slam is about a young skateboarder who has got his girlfriend pregnant. How does Juliet, Naked fit into this theme of men growing into (literal or metaphorical) adulthood?

I'm not sure it does. Hey, maybe I have come up with a new theme! These characters are too old for all that. Tucker, in particular, is dealing with the consequences of not accepting his responsibilities while he had the chance. You could say that this book is about what happens when you give your rites of passage a body-swerve.

I understand that you write for women, in that your first and primary reviewer is your wife. I was struck by this given how some of your books are about men with what seem to be such specifically male points of view. How do you think your writing would be different if you were writing for men?

Fever Pitch, for a start, would probably have been sportier, less willing to engage with the psychology and the personal meaning of football. Knowing that I was writing for a (female) editor who didn't really understand the mindset, enabled me to see the wood rather than the trees - in this case the Nottingham Forest team of the late seventies. And I think it encouraged me to poke fun at the obsessive’s in the first two books.

High Fidelity was about musical canon --about specific artists and specific albums. In your last book, Slam, you avoided giving the teenage protagonist musical interests so as not to date him. In Juliet, Naked, you’ve invented a musician and his albums. Did you find it difficult to write about an invented musician, rather than a musician whom you yourself are a fan of?

It was one of the joys of the writing process, for me, inventing a sound and a career and a back-catalogue for an artist. And I think the invention helps the book. The reader can invent a sound for themselves, something that makes perfect sense in his or her own mind's ear. Being able to hear the music would diminish the novel, I suspect.

It kind of pains me that Tucker Crowe is imaginary and I’ll never hear his music. What does Tucker Crowe’s music sound like in your mind?

I was imagining the melodic sensibilities of a Jackson Browne crossed with the rawness of some of Richard Thompson's stuff. And Tucker sings with the grain of Paul Westerberg. Or something.

Your characters are people interested in modern things - and in that respect your books seem very tied to this century and the last. On the other hand, your characters are also people who are experiencing crises of personality that seem almost universal. Your books certainly transcend region - what about time? Have you considered writing anything set in another era? A Dickensian pastiche, perhaps?

I don't think I could go further back than the twentieth century. 'An Education', the movie I wrote that's just about to open, is the first thing I've tried set in a time I didn't really know about, and I enjoyed it. But I'm not sure I'd be playing to my strengths if I wasn't allowed to deal with twentieth-century psychology and in particular contemporary mores. But here's the other objection: what's the point? Too many people are doing it already, one or two of them brilliantly, many not. And it seems to me that one of the main purposes of fiction is to get to grips with how we are and what we think now.

You’re not as much of a football fan as you used to be. Is there anything you miss about being really and truly, perhaps unhealthily, into something?

I'm still a pretty big football fan, to all intents and purposes, even though all modern sport is pretty horrible. I don't miss many games, and a bad result can still lower a mood. It won't destroy a week, though, and there's nothing I miss about that. My level of interest is unhealthy, but not, like, gangrenous.

Your big interests are books and music, and you’ll be doing a lot of travelling on this US tour - what do you prefer to do on an airplane - read or listen to music? And what are you reading or listening to right now?

I'll watch bad movies on planes, whenever possible, which through the magic of altitude and exhaustion become great movies. Have you seen "17 Again"? Why didn't anyone tell me about it before? But when I'm not watching Zac, as I now call him, I'm reading the second volume of Clive James' memoirs and listening to the Mark Mulcahy tribute album.

Nick Hornby reads from Juliet, Naked on October 9 at 7:00 p.m. at the Central Library, 1000 Fourth Avenue.