Nick Hornby - More Baths Less Talking: Notes from the Reading Life of a Celebrated Author Locked in Battle with Football, Family, and Time Itself

Nick Hornby is the author of six novels, the most recent of which is Juliet, Naked, and a memoir, Fever Pitch. He is also the author of Songbook, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for music criticism, and editor of the short-story collection Speaking with the Angel. His screenplay for An Education was nominated for an Academy Award. He lives in North London. His three previous collections of writing from the Believer magazine are The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, and Shakespeare Wrote for Money.

IN ADDITION to Nick Hornbys monthly column, every issue of the Believer features columns by Daniel Handler, Greil Marcus, and Jack Pendarvis, and essays from writers like Rick Moody, Michelle Tea, Paul Collins, Jonathan Lethem, and Deb Olin Unferth. Three annual special issues come with excellent bonus items, such as DVDs and the crazily popular music issues CD compilation. Just fill out the form below for a special Hornbyphile discount!

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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BELIEVER BOOKS:

The Polysyllabic Spree
Housekeeping vs. the Dirt
Shakespeare Wrote for Money

I ts never easy, returning home after failing to make ones way out in the world. When I left these pages in 2008, it was very much in the spirit of Goodbye, nerdy losers! Im not wasting any more time ploughing through books on your behalf! I have things to do, places to go, people to see! Ah, well. What can you do, if the people dont want to be seen? I have now become that pathetic modern phenomenon you might have read about, the boomerang childthe kid who struts off (typically and unwisely with middle finger raised), spends a couple of years screwing up some lowly job on a magazine or in a bank, and then comes back, tail between his legs, to reclaim his old bedroom and wonder how come his parents have more fun than he on a Saturday night.

Whats a parent to do? bewails a terrifying (for me) article dealing with this very issue on the website eHow.com. Its hard to turn your children away. The best thing a parent can do is help them understand that they are adults now and the rules have changed. The new rules for parents, the piece goes on to say, should include charging rent and refusing to buy toiletries and other incidentals. Im pretty sure Im going to end up getting my own way on the incidental toiletries, should it come to that. Its pretty hot here at Believer Towers, and I suspect that the Polysyllabic Spree, the 115 dead-eyed but fragrant people who edit this magazine, will cave in long before I do. Still. It wasnt what I expected when I left: that eighteen months later, Id be working for free deodorant. Whats particularly humiliating in my case is that, unlike most boomerang children, Im considerably older than those who have taken me back in. Theyre not as young as they were, the Spree, but even so.

I have decided to vent my spleen by embarking on a series of books that, I hope, will be of no interest whatsoever to the readership of this magazine. David Kynastons superlative Austerity Britain is more than six hundred pages long and deals with just six years, 194551, in the life of my country. The second volume in the series, Family Britain, 195157, has already been published, so I plan to move on to that next; Kynaston is going to take us through to Margaret Thatchers election in 1979, and Im warning you now that I plan to read every single word, and write about them in great detail in this column.

I am less than a third of the way through Austerity Britain, but I have read enough to know that this is a major work of social history: readable, brilliantly researched, informative, and gripping. Part of Kynastons triumph is his immense skill in marshaling the resources at his disposal: it seems at times as though he must have read every novel written in the period, and every autobiography, whether that autobiography was written by a member of the postwar Labour government or by a member of Englands postwar cricket team. (On page 199 of my paperback, he quotes from former Labour deputy leader Roy Hattersley, Stones bassist Bill Wyman, and cookery writer Elizabeth David, all on the subject of the miserable, bitter winter of 1947.) And it goes without saying that hes listened to every radio program, and trawled through every newspaper.

The effect Kynaston achieves is extraordinary: Britain changes month by month, like a child, and you end up feeling that every citizen of the world should have the opportunity to read a book this good about their own country. Im glad that not everyone in the U.K. has read it (although it has sold a lot of copies), because you can steal anecdotes from it and pass them off as your own. One of my favorites so far is David Leans account of showing Brief Encounter at a cinema in Rochester, Kent, to a tough audience full of sailors from the nearby Chatham dockyards. At the first love scene one woman down in the front started to laugh. Ill never forget it. And the second love scene it got worse. And then the audience caught on and waited for her to laugh and they all joined in and it ended in absolute shambles. They were rolling in the aisles. Brief Encounter is a much-loved British film, often taken out of a back pocket and waved about when someone wants to make a point about how we have changed as a nation, and what we have lost: in the old days, we spoke better, emoted less, stayed married, didnt get naked at the drop of a hat, etc. We are cursed with an apparently unshakable conviction that we are all much more knowing than people used to be, back in the Pre-Ironic Age, so it is both instructive and humbling to learn that, half a century ago, Rochester sailors didnt need the Onion to tell them what was hilarious.

The best stuff of all Kynaston has taken from Britains extraordinary Mass Observation project, which ran from the late 1930s to the mid-60s. The creators of MOthe anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the poet Charles Madge, and the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, among others (even the formidable, and formidably clever, literary critic William Empson was involved somewhere)got five hundred volunteers to keep diaries or reply to questionnaires, and the results provide the best record of what the war and its aftermath meant to ordinary Britons. True, there were some peculiar types involved; Henry St. John, a civil servant living in Bristol, scrupulously described each opportunity for masturbation, as and when it arose. A visit to Londons Windmill Theatre, famous for its nude tableaux vivants, elicits this observation: I delayed masturbation until another para-nude appeared seen frontways, with drapery depending between the exposed breasts. The day after Hiroshima sees Henry returning to a public lavatory in the northeast to see if I could masturbate over the mural inscriptions. Say what you like about the internet, but for a certain class of underemployed male, life has become warmer, and more hygienic.