Q&A: Nick Hornby

(Credit: Putnam Juvenile)

It's a curious jumble of elements: a 15-year-old London skater, his accidentally pregnant girlfriend and a talking poster of Tony Hawk. Oh, and some time travel.

Though the combination in Nick Hornby's latest book, "Slam," sounds ripe for the kind of comic misadventure found in his previous novels “About A Boy,” “How to Be Good” and “High Fidelity,” the emotional core of the book is far deeper than the sum of its parts. Writing this time for a young adult audience, Hornby has crafted a dark cautionary tale about a youthful moment when everything becomes upended.

We recently phone-stalked him to chat while he was at New York’s London Hotel. The name, he told us, was “purely a coincidence.”

Were you worried about getting specific details in the life of a 15-year-old right?
Yeah, but I got a couple of kids I knew to read the manuscript. I made a decision early on not to try the language. It seemed to me that the worst possible thing you could do is include all the “mad skills” and the “wickeds” and the “sicks” and find out that you’re hopelessly outdated even before the paperback comes out.

I kept waiting for you to slip up with the 15-year-olds' references, but you never quite did—not that I’m a barometer of that sort of thing. [Laughs] People keep saying to me, “Oh, you’ve really captured the language of this teenager,” which leads me always to ask, “Yes but, how old are you?”

That would mean there was a specific teenage voice, but there’s not. Just like there’s no specific adult voice.
I think that’s completely right—that there are different sets of teenagers out there all talking differently, and I think the task for a novelist is the same with a young adult novel as it would be for any other novel. Which is, you have to define the frame of reference and a vocabulary that fits the character.

Did you do any advance young adult reading to bone up on the subject? Judy Blume’s “Forever” or anything like that?
No. I’ve done a lot since, actually. Just because I’ve become interested. But no, I didn’t read anything. I think I was kind of emboldened because a lot of kids seemed to have read “About a Boy”—and “Fever Pitch,” my first book, has been on the exam syllabus in the U.K. So I thought, Well, I’ll just write kind of like that and hope for the best.

Did you put much thought into toning down any of the subject matter?  Or, conversely, sexing it up?
No. There’s probably not as many “fucks” as there are in “A Long Way Down,” but that’s probably not a bad thing.

Tony Hawk and his book “Occupation: Skateboarder” factor heavily in "Slam."
Initially I thought I was going to be writing about a football [i.e., soccer] player. For obvious reasons, it was something I knew about. But the more I thought about it, the more it didn’t seem right, partly because it seems to me that football isn’t really very cool in the U.K. in the way that it was. It seems way too ubiquitous to be cool.

It’s not specific enough?
It’s very Nike-ized and corporate, and quite bland in the way that it wasn’t when I was a teenager. So I’d started to think about something else, and skating seemed a bit more off the radar in that way. I felt it was specifically associated with the young in a way football isn’t. So I started to read a little bit and search, and when I came across Tony’s book, I thought it would be perfect for what I wanted to do. Because it’s quite frank and raw and he talks about mistakes he made in his relatively young fatherhood. It seemed perfect.

Did you read a lot growing up?
Yeah. Not necessarily good stuff. Mostly comics, a lot of music writing—Melody Maker, books about music. I was led toward novels not by school but by rock-and-roll, really. It was the references: The Stones wrote "Sympathy for the Devil" supposedly after reading "The Master and Margarita," so I read that. Then there was the countercultural stuff, the "Catch 22," Kerouac and all that. It was much more fun to read something that came at me sideways rather than something that was being pushed on me from above.

Like a 14-year-old reading a biography of Jim Morrison and then running off to find out who this William Blake guy is.
Right! But finding out that way makes it more comprehensible. After that, you’re prepared to make the effort.