How to Be Great

In 2003, as the culmination of a London literary lecture series, the various contributors were asked to vote for a favorite among their number — the writer’s writer, if you will. This secret ballot included such dissimilar authors as Germaine Greer, Doris Lessing, Carlos Fuentes, Helen Fielding and myself. The winner was Nick Hornby; his prize, a first edition of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.

Both the accolade and the trophy were fitting: like Dickens, Hornby, 47, is an unashamedly popular English author who unites his country’s readers, critics and fellow authors in open affection. And like Dickens he is more than just popular — he’s also very good. His novels and their sparkling film adaptations trace the soul of a contradictory, mean-spirited, beautiful, bloody-minded little island. He doesn’t always give us the England we want (especially not recently, as the books grow darker and more complex), but he offers us an accurate mirror with which to look at ourselves. Bleak House wasn’t pretty either, but English readers are grateful for the honesty, and international readers have been surprised and enlightened by this news of England. “We are not what we were,” the books seem to say, and also, “We are not what we might be �”

Writers who sell as many books as Nick Hornby don’t usually take much interest in writers who don’t, but Hornby has long been a supporter of the minor, the offbeat, the underpraised and the unnoticed. Many young writers have a Hornby back-page quote to thank for kick-starting their careers. He is also an internationalist in matters of literature; once you scratch off the Highbury grime, you find an indie transatlantic soul lurking. Channeling little-known (in Europe) American authors like Anne Tyler and Lorrie Moore, Hornby reintroduced the English novel to its long-lost domestic roots. He helped remind us that not all novels have to be about 500 years of postcolonial history or the psychogeography of a motorway; some novels can be about the soul of a man, about the house he lives in, the streets he walks, and the people he loves. It would be too easy to call Hornby’s hapless North Londoners “everymen”; in fact, he demands more of his characters than that. He presses them on toward remarkable things: they must learn to be honest, to communicate with their lovers, to be heroic, to be good.

How to be good is really the big Hornby question. How can we be good as individuals? As a community? What is it about our lives that is valuable? Most unusually for an English writer, he puts his faith squarely in the idea of culture. He believes that beautiful songs, beautiful books and yes, the beautiful game, are the great redemptive forces. He loves good stuff so much that one might call him the European Ambassador of Goodness; every chance he gets he’s championing a band, a song, a novel, a poet, a charity, an idea. Possibly the greatest of all the good stuff is that very good school for autistic children, TreeHouse, which Hornby co-founded and which gets more good every year for the simple reason that film rights and book royalties buy a whole lot of good books and teachers and resources.

But enough of the Gandhi business: the really heroic thing about Nick Hornby is that he lives in North London and rarely leaves it. His love for his patch of this great city is the most endearing thing about both the author and his work. Every English writer needs their corner that is forever England — but only a few brave men choose to make that corner Highbury. Who would have thought the square mile around Arsenal’s stadium could be a suitable surrogate for the whole wide world? — By Zadie Smith, the author of White Teeth and The Autograph Man