Sometimes Hornby and the Believer butt heads. He writes in one column that he and the magazine's editors reach an agreement "that if it looks like I might not enjoy a book, I will abandon it immediately, and not mention it by name." Listed at the top of that column are "Unnamed Literary Novel" and "Unnamed Work of Nonfiction." In the magazine's debut issue, Julavits wrote an essay arguing that most book criticism is too snarky and negative, and Hornby has more or less been instructed to avoid negative reviews.

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Love is all around in "About a Boy," but it's tucked into the nooks and crannies between wicked wisecracks, cruel-to-be-kind words and lots of eye-rolling. The movie doesn't so much envelop us in love as kick us in the butt with it, sending us on our way feeling awake and alive and a little bruised. Sometimes love hurts; other times it just smarts.

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David devotes his journalistic energies to denouncing such modern-day annoyances as grievance counselors, old people who don't have their fare ready when they board a bus, "women who wear headscarves," homeopaths and restaurant critics. Katie half wishes he'd undergo a "violent political conversion" and become a conservative ranting about "poofs and communists" because "it must be very unsatisfying to have such tiny outlets for his enormous torrent of rage." Here's how she describes to David a typical evening with their friends Andrew and Cam:

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1) Why'd he do it? While the rest of us blame the addiction -- or, if you're hard-hearted, the addict himself -- Downey's uncle, Jim Downey, blames Hollywood. "If you're as sensitive and fragile as Robert is, [the Hollywood pressure cooker is] a setup for disaster," Uncle Jim told USA Today, adding that one really oughtn't to blame Downey's dad, indie director Robert Downey Sr., who handed little Robert his first joint when he was 6 years old. "It was the times," Jim Downey insists. "No one, including Bobby, blames him."

2) Who does Bobby blame? The coppers, apparently. According to the Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs, Calif., Downey told the arresting officers who discovered 4.5 grams of cocaine and methamphetamine stuffed into a Kleenex box in his hotel room, "Don't do this to me. You're going to ruin my life."

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Translating Nick Hornby's classic "vinyl-crazed boy grows up" novel from London to Chicago works much better than I thought it would. (Don't get me wrong here: The novel's in my Top Five All-Time Books About Men, while the movie might barely squeak onto the Top 20 Agreeable Hipster Romance list.) As co-writer, co-producer and star John Cusack explains in an interview, the switch wasn't made by a Hollywood screenwriting committee but by him and his pals. They immediately knew the Chicago neighborhood where tormented hero Rob would live (Wicker Park), the corner where Rob's record store would be and the dive bar where he'd get bombed when depressed.

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That's the sum a golf caddie named James Parker is looking to collect from Douglas as compensation for the loss of his left nut. Parker blames Douglas for hitting the golf shot that bogeyed him right in the ball at the Elmwood Country Club in White Plains, N.Y., two years back.

But Douglas says it was his golfing buddy Mark Drach, not he, who nailed the caddie's unprotected gonad, rupturing it and leading to its eventual removal. And as the nutty case nears its trial date, Maximum Golf has seen fit to publish the details of Douglas' deposition in its upcoming issue.

Asked what sort of ball Drach hit, Douglas replied he hit "a liner."

"There are liners and there are liners, sir. I am not trying to be facetious," said the lawyer. "There are some people that hit a liner so low to the grass they are almost called grass-cutters. Some hit them 5 or 6 feet off the ground. What is your best recollection as to the type of hit it was?"

"He hit what we call somewhat of a duck hook," Douglas recalled. "He hit it low and hard."

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But it is not the courageous or radical film that critics and pro-choice advocates claim it to be. That particular distinction belongs to a movie that has been recognized as little more than a smart romantic comedy with an exceptionally great soundtrack. That movie, which conveys an almost revolutionary take on abortion, is "High Fidelity."

It is not surprising that "High Fidelity," directed by Stephen Frears and based on a 1995 British novel by Nick Hornby, has received almost no attention for its pro-choice politics. Its abortion plot line occupies about three minutes of film time.

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People who care about pop music, and I am one of them, like to discuss songs as liberators, as catalysts, as jokes or friends. But what of the term background music? Just as often, probably more often, listeners use music as a kind of stopgap. I like to think of fandom as a way of being in the world, but so often it's a way of avoiding the world, a barrier, a wall. Witness the witty scene in the new charmer "High Fidelity." In that film version of Nick Hornby's novel, John Cusack's Rob, a record-store owner, holes up after his girlfriend's left him and tries to put it out of his mind by reorganizing his record collection "autobiographically." He sits among his stacks of albums as if in a fort.

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The movie, perhaps inevitably, is disappointing. While the book puts you inside Rob's head and thus forces you to empathize with all his romantic clumsiness and half-assed rationalizations, watching someone behave that pathetically on-screen is an entirely different affair.

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They can breathe easy. Stephen Frears' adaptation of Hornby's 1995 novel is spiritually faithful, despite the fact that the setting has been moved from London to Chicago. Anyone who's ever been, or even just known, a record geek can tell you that love of vinyl knows no geographical boundaries. And besides that, "High Fidelity," like the book it's based on, is essentially a story about the overwhelming power of pop culture -- not just the way it can illuminate every element of our existence but also the way it can cloud our judgment. Pop music can be like a prism hanging in the window, a gorgeous little thing through which everything in life is filtered. But it can also be an excuse for never leaving the couch to actually live, and Frears, like Hornby, is acutely aware of that.

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"I have read books written
by people who obviously love football,
but that's a different thing entirely;
and I have read books written, for want
of a better word, about hooligans, but
95 percent of the millions who watch
games every year have never hit anyone
in their lives. So this is for the rest
of us, and for anyone who has wondered
what it might be like to be this way ..."

-- Introduction to
"Fever Pitch" by Nick Hornby

It was with some expectation that I
headed out of Arsenal tube station and
toward an Italian restaurant on
Northolme Road last fall to meet Nick
Hornby. I'd been a fan since his first
book, "Fever Pitch," a loving account
of the way his home team, Arsenal FC,
had been symbolically linked to every
significant event in his life, was
published in 1992.

"Fever Pitch" spoke to all British men obsessed with football
(soccer in America), but for
me there had been a special twist: I
support the team Tottenham Hotspur.
Located barely two miles from each
other, Tottenham and Arsenal have been
fierce rivals for more than 100 years.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/31/hornby/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/02/07/apowers/ http://www.salon.com/2000/02/07/apowers/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/bag/2000/02/07/apowers Tales of Beatnik Glory by Ed Sanders

This fat, jolly volume by a spirited counterculture raconteur follows the quixotic adventures of Sanders' alter ego, Sam Thomas, on the hippie frontier. Sanders animates the many freaks Thomas encounters in red-blooded Technicolor; he loves them all without falling for their bullshit.

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

Approaching reminiscence as a philosophical practice, this impressionistic roman ` clef wanders through the bohemian haunts that shaped the sensibility of an American woman of letters -- jazz clubs, expatriate cafes, the lonely nests of socialists. The portrait of Billie Holiday that comes early in the book is a cruelly insightful masterstroke.

Macho Sluts by Pat Califia

Post-Stonewall queer radicalism remains an elemental force within contemporary bohemia, and Califia is one of its fierce founding mothers. This gloriously nasty collection of stories about sadomasochism as a sexual persuasion and a source of identity helped bring a venerable lifestyle into public view, with all its complexities intact.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/02/07/apowers/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/12/02/goodman_2/ http://www.salon.com/1999/12/02/goodman_2/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/12/02/goodman Deep into the tempestuous events that form the climax of "The Beach," the fitfully precocious debut novel by Alex Garland about a beach commune gone bloodily awry, the narrator, Richard, is confronted by the ghost of a man who earlier slit his own wrists in the neighboring room of a Bangkok guesthouse. "The horror," is all the ghost will say, after appearing on the beach of the title. Richard is perplexed. "What horror?" he asks.

On its most obvious level, of course, this exchange is little more than a tart allusion to the dying words of Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz; yet something else is happening beneath this exchange -- something much larger, and much closer not only to Garland's novel's dark heart, I think, but to the heart of contemporary masculinity as well. The "horror" the ghost alludes to comes soon enough: The formerly high-minded backpackers in the commune tear the limbs and entrails from three corpses in a berserk bout of atavism, an event that Richard observes with the sort of cold detachment that one more typically applies to, say, a Fox documentary.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/12/02/goodman_2/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/08/31/singleparent/ http://www.salon.com/1999/08/31/singleparent/#comments Tue, 31 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/1999/08/31/singleparent It wasn't supposed to be like this, an annoying little voice hissed inside my head as my trusty Honda started the ascent into the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts. The summer morning was a fine one and I should have felt ebullient that first day of vacation: the aromatic mountain pine forest, the glorious views and an actual quiet moment to myself, since my 3-year-old had dozed off in her car seat. Still, I wasn't content. I wasn't -- how do the New Agers put it? -- in the moment.

The reason: I was taking my first official single-parent vacation. Sure, I had been excited to learn that there actually is such a thing: this particular one a getaway hosted by Eastover Resort in Lenox, Mass., for single parents and their kids to bond with each other and nature. Yet here I was, beating myself up about my singlehood and letting my inner bully nag me about the vacation I had really been destined for: the two perfectly behaved kids (and non-slobbering dog) in the back seat; the elaborately outfitted camper towed by my funky but stylish car; the handsome husband beside me, a man capable of making witty car conversation yet not too proud to ask for directions ... Well, it simply wasn't going to happen, I reminded myself.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/08/31/singleparent/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/05/11/feature_418/ http://www.salon.com/1998/05/11/feature_418/#comments Mon, 11 May 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/1998/05/11/feature Perkins' Rule of Inverse Editorial Suggestion holds that whenever an editor, or in this case editors, share a thought such as this one:

"Though we don't necessarily want you to ransack your own life for material (at least not to the point of finding ourselves implicated in any legal precedings [sic])"

with a writer they've hired to, say, review Nick Hornby's new novel, "About a Boy," what they want is for that writer to wantonly ransack his own life for material (the more lurid the better), up to and including implicating himself -- and himself only -- in any legal proceedings whatsoever (civil, criminal, domestic or international). Unfortunately, my life has already been so exhaustively ransacked for material there is almost nothing left to reveal -- kind of like those tombs they discover in the Valley of the Kings that were first emptied of their treasure two millennia earlier. So, instead of interjecting scenes from my personal life and romantic misadventures into this review, I freely offer the intimate secrets of an old acquaintance, who, as luck would have it, is a lawyer. But we'll get to him later. First, the book.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/05/11/feature_418/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1997/12/24/24feature_4/ http://www.salon.com/1997/12/24/24feature_4/#comments Wed, 24 Dec 1997 19:27:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/entertainment/music/feature/1997/12/24/24feature It's hard to summon feelings of nostalgia for a memory that still
surrounds you, and in a year when music fans lost more heroes than they
found (see: Laura Nyro, Fela
Kuti) and lesser artists gained more credit than they deserved (see: Hanson), a top 10 list seems like an empty and static way to close
it. Sure, it's easy enough to decide what the year's Important Releases
were -- we've been covering them all year -- but what was the music that
kept critics on their feet through too many opening bands, that kept them
writing way past deadline in the hopes that they might convey a little bit
of the passion they felt when they finally heard what they'd been waiting
for?

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