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WASHINGTON – Busy Nick Hornby. New novel. New screenplay. Dad of three.
And yet he is looking relaxed, refreshed, full of cheer. It’s not quite what you expect from a man who has made something of a career of exquisitely crafted angst.
“An Education,” the movie for which he wrote the screenplay and which his wife co-produced, has been flooded with critical praise, earned raves (and whispers of Oscar) for the performance of its young star, Carey Mulligan, and scored the top audience prize for foreign films at Sundance this year.
And with its prickly humor, warm spirit and rock-and-roll-obsessive theme, Hornby’s new book, “Juliet, Naked,” has fans and reviewers alike comparing it favorably to “High Fidelity,” his breakout novel of 14 years ago.
If all that weren’t enough, the 52-year-old Briton has also been having fun of late collaborating on songs with tunesmith Ben Folds. An album has been threatened.
So, Mr. Hornby, tell us a little about this golden touch of yours.
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t really feel like anything to do with me,” Hornby says. “When I look back on the actual creation of them, all I can really remember is playing solitaire on my computer. It’s not like I enter this zone where stuff pours out and I’m pleased with it. It feels like I’ve smoked myself sick and played too many computer games and then write in these frustrating little bursts.”
There you have it: A successful author writes between extended breaks of cigarettes and video games. Take heart, slackers!
But of course Hornby is being a bit humble. After all, three of his books (including “About A Boy”) have been turned into movies. One, “Fever Pitch,” became two movies.
Hornby doesn’t love talking about his books; “I think it’s really hard to cheerlead for your own work unless you’re an ass,” he says with a laugh. But he is thrilled to talk about his new film – which he has seen seven or eight times. He worked closely with his wife, Amanda Posey, and the director, the actors and the entire crew.
The movie, which opens Friday, presents the tale of a 16-year-old girl in repressed 1960s England looking for something more out of life than the predictable stultifying future that seemingly awaits. The young heroine is seduced by a creepy, older con artist. And yet the movie is also about taking a journey and taking chances.
Hornby adapted the screenplay from a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, and it was a project he fought hard to make happen. Where other of his film projects have floundered in development, Hornby stuck with this one because he identified with the main character’s desire to flee the dull suburbs for the vibrant life of the city.
“The more I thought about it, the more I thought about it as a different version of ‘Fever Pitch,’ ” he says. “Instead of football, it’s culture, I guess, and music in Paris and jazz clubs and art. … It’s that bright teenager looking into the city from outside and thinking, ‘How the hell am I going to get there.’ …. It’s the same impulse, I think, the same fear that you’re going to be stuck where you are.”
Although his two latest projects aren’t related, his new novel “Juliet, Naked” also is a call to arms against boredom, a warning for those who would simply let life happen to them. The novel is vintage Hornby – spirited, wry, observant, soul-stirring. The novel, about a washed-up songwriter whose mysterious decision to give up performing 20 years earlier has given rise to a cultish clique of hopelessly devoted fans, expands into the Hornbyesque territory of loneliness, melancholy and despair. It might all be unbearable if not for Hornby’s razor-sharp humor.
If his two latest projects share a seize-the-day theme, they also both express a disappointment with his homeland.
“Yeah, I think that’s probably right,” he says. “It might be something that I’m going through that came out in both of the works without me noticing it. ... The old country comes in for a bashing.” He laughs ruefully.
“It was there in ‘An Education,’ in the original piece. What I saw in her dad was that generation of people that were scared of everything, that wouldn’t go anywhere and whose tastes were very set. In ‘Juliet,’ there is a certain English mind-set that gets me down. The can’t-do spirit.”
A failure of leadership is what Hornby points to as the source of his current unhappiness.
“All the promise of the late ’90s, when (Tony) Blair came into power and it felt like a young country again and it had energy, all that has really dissipated. … For 18 years I was living in a country that was conservative in every way. And all of your hopes are pinned on this shining day in the future where something will change.”
Hornby steps outside for a smoke and a discussion of much more serious issues: the play of Arsenal, his beloved English football club; the differences between American and English comic books; and how to convince your children that you are not at death’s door despite being roughly the same age as Michael Jackson.
A quick tour of the States to promote the film awaits and then he’s back to London, to his kids, computer games, the smokes and the flickers of inspiration that will no doubt result in yet another eagerly anticipated book and, odds are, a film as well.
