Sam behaves just as Hornby believes he might have done when faced by a weepy,
white-faced girlfriend. Instead of going with Alicia to buy the pregnancy
test, he stands her up in Starbucks and switches off his mobile. “If you
don’t hear the news, then it hasn’t happened. He’s entitled to that morally
weak moment.” Later, when the test proves positive, he runs away to Hastings
and throws the phone in the sea. “I could have seen myself doing that, too.
It doesn’t come from being bad. It comes from blind panic. Even as an adult,
one does stupid things in response to a crisis. But I do believe that most
kids are good and that is why I wanted to write the book. When I saw the
young couple with their pram in the street, the boy was there. He hadn’t
buggered off.”
It was only after he started working on Slamthat Hornby discovered that
Britain has the highest teenage birthrate in Europe – twice that of France
or Germany and four times that of Holland. He puts the cause down to
“primitive” sex education in schools – schools in which it is white,
working-class boys like Sam who are most at risk of underachieving.
For Hornby, however, writing is never going to be about banging a political
drum. “I think about why anybody would want to read it, and that is about
the beginning and end of it. Is it boring? That’s my big fear. And if I am
going to be very crude about why some books are a success and some aren’t, I
would say boring books never are. It’s as simple as that. Way too many books
we are encouraged to read are not interesting enough for people who have
other things to do.” Particularly so for teenagers? “Oh God yes. You could
easily believe that the literary and education establishment is trying to
kill reading stone-dead. One of the most depressing things I have ever seen
was Andrew Motion’s list of ten books he felt all kids should have read by
the time they leave school. It included Ulysses andThe Waste Land.
“It was insane. And yet this is the attitude that filters down – that these
are great books and if you can’t read them, then you are the one with the
problem. Reading has got to be for pleasure. That’s all it’s for.” What
about reading to better ourselves and gain greater human understanding? “The
logic of that suggests that the best-read people have greater human
understanding, and that is just not the case. It’s tosh.”
Hornby is a grammar-school boy who made it to Cambridge despite achieving an
A, D and E at A level – “I do think they were actively looking for
state-school pupils.” Although he read English, he’s still not good, he
says, at long books. He’s not read, for example, Moby-Dick or War
and Peace. “There’s still part of me that feels I should have read every
classic, but as I get older, I become more bolshy about it.”
As a young man at Cambridge, surrounded by assured students with an innate
sense of entitlement, his social confidence plummeted. “I had friends, but
my friends were also the people who didn’t particularly fit in. We sat in
the pub and sneered at the ones who wanted to act or write for the student
newspaper. And there were always people to sit in the pub with.” He drifted
through his twenties, teaching English in a comprehensive, writing
screenplays that didn’t work out, going through therapy for depression. Fever
Pitch was published in the same year that Danny’s mother, Virginia
Bovell, found herself pregnant. They married, then Danny had autism
diagnosed. Life seemed relentlessly, cruelly uphill.
Today, he and Virginia share care of Danny, who attends TreeHouse, a special
school that they have both helped to found and his success has helped to
fund. He has, thanks to Hollywood’s admiration for his work, more money than
his modest tastes will ever demand. He met his current partner, the film
producer Amanda Posey, while they were making the Fever Pitch movie.
He takes their sons to school, comes to his writing flat, lunches with
friends and finds himself, rather incredulously, “living the life I wanted
to live”. I’m not surprised when he tells me that his next book, already in
his head, is going to be about hope.
Immersing himself in the world of teenagers has made him appreciate that, in
many ways, he’s been lucky. “Soft drugs, loud music, trying to get served in
pubs – that was my teenage years. It could be that we grew up in the best
possible time for humanity. We missed the Second World War, there was no
nuclear holocaust and we’ll be dead before the profound effects of global
warming are felt.” InSlam, he uses a flash-forward device,
allowing Sam to project his life into the future and discover that the world
didn’t fall apart after all. “Before you have children, all you can see is
the trappings of misery. That is how it feels for Sam. What you can never
understand, until you hold the baby in your arms, is the incredible
emotional pull.
“At that point, you are prepared to give up everything. It’s the experience of
you, me, everybody.” He’s right, of course. And he is also right when he
says that the mere act of reading a book doesn’t guarantee greater human
understanding. But if anyone – teen or adult – doesn’t emerge fromSlamwith
an enhanced sense of empathy, then I’m a banana.
A hit with my age group
Slam is about a teenage boy called Sam who enjoys skateboarding and
talking to his life-sized poster of Tony Hawk (his hero) in a crisis.
He meets a girl called Alicia, and before he knows it she’s pregnant. Afraid,
Sam runs away but comes back and starts having dreams about the future of
his son.
Slam will appeal to teenagers cos it’s quite colloquial and casual and
deals with problems facing teenagers today. The way Sam thinks is similar to
the way my friends and I think. Having Tony Hawk in it made it more cool.
I’ve read About a Boy twice and I think that book has more funny
bits. Slam is also funny but it has got more stuff in it about girls.
The one thing I wasn’t sure about was the ending, which was quite hard to
follow. But I enjoyed reading it. I would give this book 8.5/10.
Oli Hammett, 14
Nick Hornby discusses his new novel Slam (published on October 4 by
Penguin) on Friday at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. To
book call 01242 227979 or visit www.cheltenhamfestivals.com
