posted on 15 Nov 2018

The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

Ever since the publication in 1996 of Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby has been a reliable fixture on the literary scene. Somehow he’s pulled off the trick of being mainstream and slightly alternative at the same time – his audience appeal spans quite a range, from the laddish to the music obsessive by way of the bookish.

The Polysyllabic Spree is a journey into this latter bookish incarnation. It’s a 2004 publication that brings together the book review columns Hornby contributed to The Believer Magazine that was published under Dave Eggar’s McSweeney imprint.

Each column takes the same format; headed by a list of books he’s purchased that month alongside a companion list of what he’s actually read with a note, if necessary, of what he started reading but abandoned. Hornby certainly knows his audience and their love of lists – it’s a brilliant wheeze that immediately captures people like me who love to have this glimpse into the compulsive behaviour of fellow bibliophiles. He did, of course, pull off a similar trick with his novel High Fidelity where listing favourite tracks, favourite albums and reorganising whole record collections to reflect new lists is a central obsession of the protagonists.

One of the effects of this listing of his reading successes and failures is to make the author feel like ‘one of us’ rather than a distant arbiter of taste pontificating from an elite vantage point. And, capitalising on this, Hornby follows through by making the reviews of what he’s been reading both immediate and, in plenty of cases, hugely amusing. It’s not that often that a book review can be laugh-out-loud funny but he does pull that off more than one occasion.

There is some slightly annoying  name-dropping here – I guess that’s the inevitable consequence of finding yourself moving in literary circles and when your brother-in-law is Robert Harris – but you really do get the sense that he actually likes the books he says he likes and doesn’t hold back if it’s something he struggles with. There’s a nice observation on the fact that the magazine he’s writing for has a policy of only being positive about the books they review – even if amounts to a sort of positive negativity as it were – but he also finds ways around this. I especially like his review of a novel by Paula Fox where the author writes about her character’s ruminative and philosophical response to coming home to find that the house has been burgled. Hornby concludes:

“At this point, I realized with some regret that not only could I never write a literary novel, but I couldn’t even be a character in a literary novel. I can only imagine myself, or any character I created, saying, ‘Shit! Some bastard has trashed the house!’ No rumination about artist friends–just a lot of cursing, and maybe some empty threats of violence.”

Despite the creation of the sense of immediacy, the almost real-time responses to what he’s been reading, and the humour, Hornby’s assessments of the books he’s read are insightful and informative – they really do function as legitimate book reviews. I liked the fact that he went for books I’d never have gone for myself and that he was able to persuade me that they were worth getting hold of.

I have to say, however, that he’s always most persuasive and most engaged when he’s writing about what he loves – he clearly has a huge amount of respect for Roddy Doyle for example – and that’s never more obvious than when he gets onto his greatest love, Dickens.

“Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)” 

The reviews are jam-packed with quotable lines and it would be almost impossible to capture them all – you’d be much better off just getting a copy of the book (it’s not expensive and there is now an extended version called The Complete Polysyllabic Spree) and reading the reviews yourself to find the ones that most appeal to you. I can pretty much guarantee you’ll find something that will make you say ‘Yes! That’s exactly right!’

I will, however, just leave you with this meditation:

“All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.” 

And if you’re trying to think of party games over the dreaded Christmas and New Year, what about this?

“Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go 15 rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. “The Magic Flute” v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. “The Last Supper” v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don’t know how scientific this is, but it feels like the novels are walking it. You might get the occasional exception -– “Blonde on Blonde” might mash up The Old Curiosity Shop, say, and I wouldn’t give much for Pale Fire’s chance against Citizen Kane. And every now and again you'd get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I'm still backing literature 29 times out of 30.” 

 

Terry Potter

November 2018