Nick Hornby, the very successful British novelist who wrote “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy,” is also a confident and accomplished book reviewer. For six years, in The Believer magazine, he has contributed a monthly column about books he likes.
Called “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” it is of a peculiar kind. Some months he doesn’t read anything (during the World Cup, or when he pretends to have been taken for re-education and forced to read “Gravity’s Rainbow” or when, one month, he just watches DVDs). He always lists the books he has bought and the books he has read, and most months he buys more than he reads. He acknowledges when he has only read part of a book.
Most important, and apparently as a result of The Believer’s policy, he avoids negativity. When a book displeases him, he may refer to it, but not by name. He likes to enjoy the books he reads and write at length only about books he enjoys.
His most recent collection, “Shakespeare Wrote for Money,” is his third and last. (The first two were called The “Polysyllabic Spree” and “Housekeeping vs. the Dirt.”) It is lively, funny and engaging and, without heavy-handedness, defends reading and writing against the forces Hornby thinks threaten them, including dullness and pomposity and snobbery.
About one book he writes that it is “a sophisticated piece of adult entertainment (and by the way, that last word is never used pejoratively or patronizingly in these pages).” As for one (unidentified) novel he quit on, he says it was “partly because I became frustrated with the deliberate imprecision of its language, its obfuscation, its unwillingness to give up its meaning quickly and easily.”
Hornby rejoices to concur with the common reader, in part because he worries that reading may become less and less common. Maybe his standards — clarity, entertainment, bringing the reader enjoyment — have evolved defensively, to justify the kind of book he writes himself, and for which he has been much damned. He writes the “popular” novel, contrasted with the “literary” novel, for which he has limited patience.
My favorite Hornby declaration comes in his review of Cormac McCarthy’s distressing post-apocalyptic “The Road”:
“The literary world has a tendency to believe that the least consoling worldview is the Truth . . . Yes, it’s the job of artists to force us to stare at the horror until we’re on the verge of passing out. But it’s also the job of artists to offer warmth and hope and maybe even an escape from lives that can occasionally seem unendurably drab.”
Why do we read a book of reviews, anyway? To entertain ourselves — for after all, reviews are a form of literature, too — and to enjoy an encounter with a lively intelligence as it confronts books worth knowing about. That I finished this book with a list of 12 or 15 books that I now want to read is a measure of his success.
Merritt Moseley teaches literature at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
