I've enjoyed all of the movies made based on Nick Hornby novels, and so I set out to read the novels that have not yet been made into movies. I've finished two - the award winners A Long Way Down and How To Be Good - and I'm not motivated to continue with the rest. While there are innumerable reasons why people deem novels to be great, I cannot reason on my own why critics have found these two novels worthy of awards. The motif that stood out to me immediately in both books is his juxtaposition of the ridiculous with the everyday, and more precisely, the placement of people that we might normally know - single mothers, wannabe rock stars, struggling small business owners, columnist for a local paper and married doctor with two children - in ridiculous situations. I grant that these things could happen to ordinary people - anything is possible - but they're so unlikely I would categorize them as "too silly to dream up."
I'll use examples from How To Be Good since they are most fresh in my mind: It is ridiculous that a columnist for a local paper who prides himself as the most cynical person in England, or at least in his "postal code," would visit a spiritual healer just to spite his wife, and then become an immediate and total convert. It is ridiculous that his wife, however guilty she felt about having an affair, would agree to allow said homeless spiritual healer to live with them (and their two children) in their home. It is ridiculous that his wife's lover, who wasn't particularly interested in her real feelings and clearly made it a habit to philander with married women, would show up at her house to confront her husband in an attempt to convince her to leave with him. It is ridiculous and superfluous to include a conversation where a slow, suspicious patient asks a doctor, in all earnestness, whether he can assist her with her surgeries, of which she has none to perform. The list goes on.
While I find Hornby's casual writing style unchallenging and easy to digest, his novels are not particularly engaging or fulfilling. The novels I've read, and now that I reflect on it, the movies as well, lack cleverly-constructed plots or deeply nuanced characters, two attributes I usually associate with good fiction. The ridiculous situations aren't constructed into a plot with a climax and a resolution (not really). You just end up somewhere in the lives of the characters chronologically later than where you began. And the characters never end up far (morally or emotionally) from where they started. It's as if he wants to point out how ordinary people in real life don't really change, at least not much, even when forced to experience ridiculous (aka dramatic) situations. Maybe some who praised these novels thought this was worth saying, and maybe my narrow intellect lacks a fine-tuned appreciation for the ridiculous. Nonetheless, I finished each book thinking he could have done so much more with the subject matters he took on, and wondering what he was trying to accomplish with the preceding 300+ pages.
I might still be entertained and somewhat fulfilled if he offered obscure information (which always fascinates me and from which I could learn something), but he doesn't.
And yet, as I mentioned at the outset, I find all of the films based on his novels entertaining, if not really all that fulfilling, and am sure I would find films based on these novels just as entertaining. Query why I can separate entertainment value from the story's merit in movies, but not in novels (a topic for another day).
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