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While in San Francisco on a recent reading tour, Hornby spoke with Salon about writing for film, his preference for American fiction, and the Rob Fleming that lives in all of us. When "High Fidelity" became such a hit, people compared you to Martin Amis. What did you make of the comparison? Well, the first three or four books of his I think are great. I guess anyone who's under 45 who uses any kind of demotic in their writing is bound to be compared to him, because he was one of the first people that started to do it in English fiction. I think it's kind of inevitable. But I think I'm probably more like Kingsley than Martin Amis. But he's not what people talk about so much anymore. I don't think of "High Fidelity" as a real hip book. It's probably hip for publishing, because they don't really get it -- if you read any kind of "hip" magazines, it's usually painfully unhip, you know. Irvine Welsh is hip for all sorts of reasons, but with "High Fidelity" I can't see it really, apart from that it has some rock and roll in it. It's sort of redemptive, which isn't very hip. Was your book received differently in the U.S. than in England? It was published in a different context at home, because I'd just had a book that had done really, really well ("Fever Pitch"). It had been in the best-seller list for six months, so "High Fidelity" was reviewed in the context of that one. That was fine, but here it's been completely fresh. I've actually enjoyed reading these reviews in the states much more -- not because they were bad in England, but because I felt they were concentrating much more on the merits of the book rather than on anything I've done before. Do you feel the publishing climate is very different in the U.S. than in England? I think English literature has gotten really bogged down over the last few years. English authors are very content to write for a very small audience, and I think that shows. I like the people who are getting into bookshops that wouldn't normally -- Irvine Welsh has done that, Roddy Doyle has done that; I like those two a lot. But the very sort of quiet, crafted English literary fiction by people who are very well-known doesn't really do an awful lot for anybody, and just seems very static and staid. It doesn't really deal with any world that I live in. I've always read American people since I started to write. Who are you reading now? I just started "Going Down" by Jennifer Bell, which I really like. When you write about Rob, the main character in "High Fidelity," you have such funny insight into some stereotypically male issues -- fear of commitment, fear of intimacy, etc. Are you anything like him? Rob doesn't have an awful lot of perspective on relationships, and I suppose if I didn't, then I wouldn't have been able to write the book. There were times I found myself writing something that maybe would be too smart for him, or something where he'd gotten too much insight into something too quickly. When I wrote stuff that made complete sense to me, that meant that I'd gone a bit too far. It's as if Rob were a halfway-evolved version of yourself, which is one of the main themes of "High Fidelity" -- that most people stop growing up after adolescence. Do you find that to be true? I think it's really hard to find people you meet who you think, "That person is 100 percent adult." I don't really know a whole lot of people like that -- more women than men, though. There is a great streak of childishness -- well not childishness, really, because so much of it revolves around sex -- but you find it in everyone. It's like when Rob laments that sex is the only absorbing activity he's found in adulthood that can make him feel like a ten-year-old. I think one is always looking for the experience you had as a child of not knowing where one was -- whether it was watching TV, or reading a book. You know, I can find things like that every now and again, but I do miss it. So much post-modern stuff, where they want to tell you all the time, "You're reading a book, and you should be aware you're reading a book, and you shouldn't be absorbed in it, and there's a right way to read..." and I'm like, "God, just let me sink into this, please." All of which only serves to make you more self-conscious, not more self-aware. Exactly -- like all those blurbs on the back covers that say "it's about reading." So I say, okay, well -- what does it say about reading? Rob dreams of being a music critic. Have you ever done any music writing? When I was 19 or 20 I would have really liked to have done it, but I never had the gumption. It was a time in British music writing where the journalists were bigger than the artists themselves. I don't know if you'd know the names -- like Nick Kent and Julie Burchill -- they were really scary people. The idea of walking into this office at the age of 19 and having to deal with these people, I thought, well, I'm not even going to try. When you say you want to write, that actually doesn't narrow it down very much. There's a hundred million different ways of writing, and it takes you a long time to sort through that stuff. And I think it takes anyone a long time to find a voice. When I started seriously, I tried to write a screenplay -- that I didn't get far down the line with. I don't think I was so far off base when I first started with the screenplay, actually. But the thing you don't realize when you start is that it is actually easier to get a book published than to get any kind of script read. The great thing about publishing is that they're prepared to take a punt on a new writer and they think, okay, well, maybe this book might not do very much, but by the third book we reckon that can establish him or her. Was that your intent -- to get published so you could then get your screenplays produced? I don't want to do screenplays exclusively, but I really enjoyed the experience of adapting "Fever Pitch." I'd never collaborated properly with anybody before, because you sit on your own all the time when writing a book; you work with an editor, but only when it's finished. I liked meeting with the producer and the director. They did me a lot of good in that I was able to talk about my work unselfconsciously, whereas I think most writers of prose get really defensive about being edited. The degree of examination that goes on in film is very interesting for a writer, because there's not a line that goes unchallenged in a script. You do so many drafts, so every single conjunction is subject to some kind of thought, which never happens with books. Or it happens less and less, because there are fewer and fewer good editors working in publishing houses. If you're a best-selling writer, then they just want to chuck the book out there, because people will buy it anyway. If you're a new writer, then who gives a shit, why put all this work into something no one's going to read. And you're lucky to find editors who are prepared to sit down and work hard with you, whereas on film they have to do it. I came away with the idea that I'd like to write books the way people write screenplays. I think I'm not going to let another line go through unexamined. |
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