DCist Interview: Nick Hornby

In your new novel, Juliet, Naked we once again have a character — Duncan — who is obsessed with pop music like Rob from High Fidelity was. What appeals to you as a storyteller about obsessives?

Well, they're funny I think. They tend to have lost perspective a little bit. That's a gift for a fiction writer, for someone who has no perspective on himself. I think there are a lot of them around. I've known them all my life, so it's not as if they're a rare breed.

Duncan, I think, was conceived as a kind of academic obsessive. You know, if he had an obsession with Jane Austen or Walt Whitman or somebody he would be gainfully employed at a university. But because he's obsessed with a songwriter, he's got to mooch around on his own.

I also thought the world had changed since High Fidelity. I find that now you can talk to people exactly like you, all day and all night. It's really a new thing.

Do you feel like that's not, on the whole a good thing — that people can now self-select who they socialize and correspond with, and reduce the likelihood of having to deal with someone with whom they might not agree?

I do think it's a mixed thing, that somebody like Duncan can . . . You know, 20 years ago if he lived in this town, then I think in all likelihood he would be a very lonely man. And it's kind of neat that he's not.

On the other hand, I'm not sure it's ever healthy to stay entirely within one's field of expertise. I think good things are produced when you allow yourself to be open to a lot of influences.

Duncan is very superior and even cruel toward his girlfriend, Annie. I wonder how much of that, do you think, is a symptom of his mania, or his need to be the foremost expert on this has-been songwriter, Tucker Crowe — a subject of little interest to most people.

It's absolutely related to that. I think that kind of misplaced confidence in one's own place in the world is the hallmark of an obsessive.

In High Fidelity, Rob's obsession is really within an entire artform, not just one singer. Not that Rob was a particularly nice guy either, but he seemed more —

No, Rob was — it was going out of him a little bit. I always thought that he had made life-choices as a result of his obsession, and now he was stuck with a life that he didn't want so much. But he is obsessed with an entire artform, which I think is a lot more healthy.

I don't remember in High Fidelity-the-novel if we're ever told Rob's age, or if I'm just picturing him as John Cusack because of the movie. But he's younger than Duncan is, right?

Oh yeah. These characters are older. I think Rob is 35. But these characters are, you know, in their mid-to-late 40s. Annie is a little bit younger than that.

And Rob seems to be having this painful dawning of self-awareness, which Duncan — well, maybe it's forced upon him. But he sure doesn't get there on his own.

Yeah, right, and there's no kind of rite of passage stuff possible with these characters, because it's too late. [Laughs.] Life is already gone.

So you think even for Annie it's too late?

She's right on the cusp. I'd like to think that she's beginning to find, or has found, her way out, by the end of the book.

Annie a more sympathetic character than either Duncan or Tucker, the songwriter. Laura in High Fidelity was a lot smarter and nicer than Rob, too. Why are your female characters so much more admirable and likeable?

Well, the men are the comic butt to the novels to a certain extent. You know, when I say obsessives are funny, I think they are funny, but they're kind of messed up as well. And if you're going write novels that are at least semi-comic, then I think those characters are going to draw most of the focus for the comedy.

I think that Annie is more of mess than Laura from High Fidelity. I think Laura was maybe too sorted out for my purposes. Whereas Annie has made mistakes and is frustrated with herself for spending way too long in a certain place with the wrong person.

It seems that would be one of the hardest things to calibrate with a character: how self-aware, or how deluded, they are. Do you have write someone for a while before that becomes clear to you, or is that one of the first things you understand about a character as you're dreaming him or her up?

It's certainly before I start writing. The conception itself can take some time. I don't start to write until I know what the voice is, and I can hear it, and I know the extent to which they are mistaken or deluded about themselves. Doing that in the writing is not a good way of doing it, I don't think.

Your prose has the illusion of effortlessness about it. Are you a heavy reviser, or do your first drafts tend to resemble closely what you ultimately publish?

I'm a heavy riviser as I go. So in the course of the day maybe not so much gets done, but what I end up with at the end of a day is usually something that will end up in the book. After I'm done with the first draft, there will be a couple more, but those tend to be light drafts. The real sort of messing around with the sentences takes place while the book is being written. I don't like to leave something if i know it's not going to stay.

That sounds like a slow way to work, perfecting one chapter before you go on to the next.

It is. You know, I go home some days thinking that this is no job for a grown-up person. [Laughs.] But I think if you work steadily, and every day, it does accumulate. If you work on a book for a year, you can get a fair number of words out.

I hope this isn't a boring line of questioning, but do you keep office hours?

Yeah, I do. I have an office, which is outside the home. It's, like, ten minutes' walk away. I tend to drop one of the kids off at school and go straight on.

I don't particularly want to work evenings or weekends, and I don't think it's particularly fair to work evenings or weekends because I have all day to myself. I wouldn't like to have to explain at home that the muse has suddenly taken me, so I won't be involved in bathtime or bedtime or weekends. [Laughs.]

I know a few guys who had the same traumatic experience of reading High Fidelity that I did, and who I suspect will react to Juliet, Naked in the same way once they've read it, where you recognize elements of yourself in the characters of Rob and Duncan. That's not flattering or comforting, obviously. Have you heard that from a lot of young or middle-aged men?

Yes. A lot. Rob is extraordinary, in terms of the number of people that have come up to me and confessed quite happily to being a Rob or living with a Rob. I didn't necessarily think that was a cause for great celebration. From their points of view, anyway. [Laughs.]

Yeah. Your books are funny, but there's so much pain in them. They remind me more of Woody Allen's films than of other prose writers' work. The laughs really come at a cost.

Well, I'm not interested in only writing comedy. Comedy works better if there is something that sets it off, but as a reader I tend to lose interest and patience with a purely comic novel -- especially the last third because they're trying to pay off some narrative that you really've got no interest in, and it stops being real.

The whole realism thing is very important to me. My favorite books are books that are funny and sad. That's what I try to write.

You still have a classic comic structure to Juliet, Naked, though, wherein Annie and Tucker make this unlikely connection. This is the kind of thing that seems infinitely more plausible with the Internet . . .

Yes, exactly.

Did you get that plot out of thinking, "Here's something that could happen in this new world?"

Yeah. Quite often when you look at a website, there's an email address where you can contact whoever it is. You assume it's spurious, or looked after by an assistant, but you just never know. And people have Google alerts on themselves, so it seems way more possible than it ever has before.

You're friendly with some musicians of note. To write the character of Tucker, the reclusive former songwriter, did you interview anybody, or did you just kind of riff off of publicly known facts about other musicians, past or present?

It's a mixture of things. Obviously, there's a bit of Salinger in him, too. It wasn't just musicians; it was writers as well, In some ways, writing about Tucker is writing about writing. But people are more interested in musicians than they are in novelists. [Laughs.]

There are parts of me in there, and there are parts of musician friends and parts of other writers. There are little references to episodes in famous musicians' lives.
That's how it started, anyway. The moment you get [characters] to actually do things in the narrative, they start to become their own people. They become psychologically real people to me once I've got them, and I've made them start to act.

Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked is available now at bookstores everywhere. He speaks at Politics and Prose tonight at 7 p.m.