I know for a fact that I could be a better writer than Nick Hornby. The guy has almost zero flow or class as a writer. These are both issues I have dealt with myself, but I had no idea there were people worse at either of them than me. Much less people who are actually published.
On the spectrum of authors for authors and authors for the opposite class of people (The kinds of people who basically do nothing with their minds and life but consume other peoples' stuff) Hornby falls into the second category so insufferably as to make him a posterchild for a major problem: People are consuming horrible art and making themselves appear intelligent for mentioning that they have read it.
It's a very artful book cover, no doubt, in which the text of Juliette Naked is enshrined and that's likely a source of grand appeal, but it's a terrible piece of fiction from a stylistic and plot point of view. Basically nothing of visceral moment happens apart from a scene where an American kid shows Duncan, the antagonist of the story-if he can even be called that- a secret route to bathroom inside the idol and fairy godfather of the story's ex girlfriend's home. This, by the way, is to underline Duncan's obsession with the character of Tucker Crow. The question is why Hornby couldn't write the whole book that well. The answer as far as I'm concerned is sheer laziness.
If the level of analyzing antagonists, and helpers and protagonists are getting to be a little bit of a headache it's because I've jumped the gun. Let me explain who is who, and in the process break down how viciously bad this performance is by Hornby.
The antagonist can be called this for stealing from the happiness of the hero. It's her boyfriend. Her being the woman who is stuck in a small town without the wherewithal to do anything about it, and worse than that, is stuck even further in the world that her rockstar afficionado boyfriend has built around them over those 15 years. This is Annie, a kind of badly depicted some-kind-of-girl-next-door derivative glamorized idol of sensitivity or intelligence, but who only comes across as cutting and phlegmatic in turns, and very boring on the whole. Her sole achievement was to write the rockstar hero of the Novel, an email that won her onto his side; so dexterous was she at seeing his soul in this shoddy letter that, after a gruellingly long wait and many gushing paragraphs, he comes to the town to light it up. He is the helper, she is the hero of her happiness. In a textual analysis, we say he helps her become the hero of her quest to find happiness. Of course, this is all written in a very staid, British style, which fails to serve the plot.
(The above setting outlines the need in the novel of some kind of distopian thrill like in that unforgetable "Never let me go" Novel by Ishiguru, but no, the whole plot is a more like a "plodding" than a plot at all, a flat, colorless, and unmemorable waste in all situations but a few. )
Now to a textual assessment of one of Hornby's most annoying traits. This is an author who clearly operates by his connections in the publishing industry, and whom it seems clear to me, has made it where he is without appreciable skill as a writer:
Hornby constantly stitches together his scraps of paper that he writes each morning - or whenever it is that he writes- to put thoughts, entirely unprocessed, into his characters brains in order to resemble a character thinking about their situation. In the process he lives in a world of words that he turns over and over analytically and then makes the characters say them. This is certainly an unforgivable shortcut for a man who has put out books at a pace approaching that of McDonalds hamburgers. Allow me to demonstrate:
(The analogy of losing 15 years as £15,000) was only helpful up to a point, obviously. Time wasn't money. Or rather (the time she was talking about couldn't be converted into cash, like the services of a lawyer or prostitute.) Or rather (one last "or rather," otherwise she'd have to concede that this whole way of thinking about time wasn't working) it could, theoretically, but nobody was going to pay her.
Hornby - Riverhead Books - 2010
Clearly women do not think analytically like this, and clearly they don't use the word theoretically as a habit, and they don't think as writers do when they turn over the meanings of words and count how many times they've used them in one thought. More to the point, people don't think in words! This book is a real train-wreck as far as literature goes, and so are many popular books even now. The situation has not improved. Which brings me to my final thought: Only independent publishers matter right now.
And the worst part of all?
I can't get back the last- what seemed like 15 years - it took to read the thing.
Bibliography:
Juliet, naked; Hornby - Riverhead Books - 2010
Comments
Post a Comment