The Polysyllabic Spree
by Nick Hornby
Believer Books, 143 pp., $14 (paper)
In donating the proceeds from the book to humanitarian organizations (a student writing center in Brooklyn and a charity for autistic children), the publishers of this collection – 14 months of Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column in The Believer – have made it review-proof. What – I’m going to dissuade gentle readers from helping these two worthy causes while virtually dishing about Great Art with the world’s leading purveyor of London lad lit? I’m not, actually, but unless you’re a Hornby completist driven to paroxysms over the man’s every quotidian observance, get ready to throw the book at the wall more than once: at the twee (titular) references to the Believer brass, at a gratuitous excerpt from Great Expectations, and at Hornby’s grousing about having too few chances to read. Of course, he’s also brilliant and wry and a fiercely astute critic: He recommends all the right books for all the right reasons. Taken in their intended periodic doses, these essays would be simultaneously entertaining and enriching – no small feat, that. Collected, they’re still breezy and thought-provoking, but read at once they show Hornby struggling with great seriousness between an Arsenal match, The Fortress of Solitude, and going down to the pub: a dilemma welcomed by, say, Kentucky coal miners or single mothers working retail. “I’ve been a father for ten years now,” Hornby confides in March of 2004, “and not once have I been able to sit down and read several hundred pages of Dickens during the Christmas holidays.” An elite publication that winkingly nurtures its readers’ sense of intellectual singularity, The Believer could print such a statement without irony (or with irony I’m unable to properly appreciate since my 3-year-old erased my notes). Yet Hornby himself is quite the populist: He praises Mystic River for being both accessible and textually rich, and he did, after all, rescue the British from their “hey-nonny-no phony heritage” and restore them to the world as consumers of Motown and mass entertainment. Still, it’s easy to tire of the metadiscussion and crave something more substantial, and something is lost when Hornby returns from his excerpt of Charlotte Moore’s George and Sam, a memoir of raising autistic children that is as fresh and conversational as Hornby’s prose, but without the arm’s-length layers of cheek.This article appears in March 11 • 2005.