songbook - nick hornby.

As the draft of my novel has progressed, I’ve found it increasingly difficult, reading other fiction, to engage the material at the meta end of the scale. Overall meanings, thematic happenings—I’ve recently devoted a large and largely pointless amount of brain space trying to invent and extract and relay those things in my own story, and frankly, at this point in time, reading someone else pull it off makes me tired. My story’s themes—what it’s about—are set, at this point. What’s not set are the character’s trimmings, their manner of behavior; and, in particular, the ambling pontifications of the narrator—how they unfold in proportion to the actions and conflicts in the story. These things being the case, I’ve been glad, in recent weeks, to take up books that play directly off the short form, as well as those with a narrative style that features a very familiar and direct voice.

Nick Hornby’s Songbook is one of these. A collection of more than thirty-five short essays on pop songs—essays in a rather loose sense, perhaps just as accurately and not less specifically called pieces—he points to the motivations for writing the book in the first, on Teenage Fanclub’s Your Love is the Place that I Come From.

First, from the end of the essay—
Now, whenever I hear “Your Love Is the Place that I Come From,” I think about that night, of course—how could it be otherwise? And initially, when I decided to write a little book of essays about songs I loved (and that in itself was a tough discipline, because one has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect), I presumed that the essays might be full of straightforward time-and-place connections like this, but they’re not, not really. In fact, “Your Love Is the Place that I Come From” is just about the only one. And when I thought about why this should be so, why so few of the songs that are important to me come burdened with associative feelings or sensations, it occurred to me that the answer was obvious: if you love a song, love it enough for it to accompany you throughout the different stages of your life, then any specific memory is rubbed away by use.



And second, from the middle—
Writers are always squeezing things out because books and articles are supposed to be a certain number of words, so you have in your hand the actual (i.e., natural, unforced, unpadded) shape of this particular book; it is, if you like, and organic book, raised without force-feeding or the assistance of steroids. And with organic stuff, you always have to pay more for less. Anyway…

That ellipsis is his—it’s the actual end of the essay—and this is important to me: It points to how Hornby’s decided to put his words on the page, as do the em dash-enabled asides and frequent parentheticals: the voice is going to be eloquent and well-conceived, but also indulgent, and generally trustful that you’re with him and going to stay there. The first of the quotes above is longer than it needs to be, by a stretch, but I indulged—it’s long enough to capture Hornby’s rolls and rhythm’s, present throughout the book.

Also, and this is equally important to me right now, it captures his way of speaking ideas: his thoughts have a starting point that’s clear and honestly felt, and then he adapts or changes them as the essay moves along (“…and when I thought about why this should be so…”).

On the meta-themed level I claim to find so tiresome, just now, this is why Songbook is so great: It’s immensely personal—nearly as much about the mind and experience of Nick Hornby as it is about the power and romance of the song—and it’s also highly social. His own theories and vulnerabilities are worth going into because of how they’re connected to a given song, and he’s a terrific writer, so that’s fun; but the real juice is brought to you by the transitive property of songness, which says that two people can talk about a song they feel for and come away from conversation with a significantly increased understanding of each other. When I first read the first essay, I didn’t particularly know Your Love Is the Place that I Come From, and yet, so tasty was Hornby’s description of how that song had stuck with him, and the irregularity of how it's done so, given the other songs he’s loved over time, that I immediately connected it to Simon & Garfunkel’s Kathy’s Song, which is, to me, singularly and lastingly about a time and place that circumnavigated my badly conceived expectations. And I'd never thought about that before; I had in fact used Kathy's Song as a marker of what a song can mean to me, when given a specific piece of land in my own personal history ... and so there I was, after all of three and a half pages, with an understanding of music's personal power that was a click deeper.

He’s sneaky, this Nick Hornby, with the way he makes you want to know him even as you feel he's rather like you.