From lad-lit to lit

Nick Hornby is his real name. But it is also an ideal nom de plume for a writer who wants to evoke the 1970s world of fathers, sons and train sets. Perhaps it is this accidental everyman quality that has prevented Hornby's books from attracting serious critical attention. Selling millions of copies hasn't helped, either.

Now that his most recent novel has been shortlisted for the Whitbread prize, Hornby is having to suffer being reassessed as a literary author. Does his acceptance into the literary culture mark the passing of lad lit, the genre which he helped to invent? Does it mean that the alleged crisis in masculinity is over? Or is it simply a recognition that A Long Way Down, Hornby's fourth novel and his first in four years, is a significant book that merits a place on any shortlist? The answers lie somewhere back down the road along which he has led his unsuspecting readers, from lad lit to existentialism.

With his first book, Fever Pitch, Hornby invented a genre and a gender. It is now part of publishing folklore that the book's initial print run was frantically expanded as demand went through the roof. Hornby's publishers were slow to grasp what he had done with this odd little memoir about his obsession with Arsenal football club. But the results are to be found on bestseller lists and five-a-side pitches across Britain, wherever balding men in early middle age get together to compare notes on work and life. We all live in a version of Hornby's Highbury—Hornbury?—now. We can't hold him single-handedly responsible for giving birth to a generation of university-educated but emotionally impaired men, but he did give them an identity and a way of thinking about themselves that has rippled out through British culture.

Hornby himself exemplified the species in Fever Pitch, and his fictional counterparts, Rob in High Fidelity and Will and Marcus in About a Boy, were soon joined by Egg in the BBC2 series This Life, Adam on ITV's Cold Feet and the younger male protagonists of almost any television sitcom since the mid-1990s. It is a mark of the generic hold that Hornby had on the popular imagination in the 1990s that three very different actors—Colin Firth in Fever Pitch, Hugh Grant in About a Boy and John Cusack in High Fidelity—could play his male leads without losing sight of Hornby's character (though perhaps only Cusack was equipped to evoke the melancholy at the heart of it).

Through it all, Hornby anxiously—but profitably—sought to reassure his readers that a man could read books, be friends with feminists, even cry—and still be a man. That many of his readers were in fact women is significant: they, too, needed reassurance that the confused young men they had landed were, indeed, the males of the species, even if—as Katie in How to be Good discovers—the wives were now both breadwinners and disciplinarians. With his series of weak-willed, lager-drinking losers, Hornby provided consolation to both sexes while stoking the fires of neurosis. In so repeatedly asking, "What is a man?" Hornby intimated that the question was the only one that mattered. Instead of giving a definitive answer, however, he introduced into the popular consciousness a particular breed of male—Hornby Man—and suggested that he defined the sex in the late 20th century.

Hornby Man is obtuse, although not to the point of idiocy. He finds women both desirable and incomprehensible, and takes solace in timewasting exercises. And he is a compulsive listmaker. Hornby Man lurks in the ancestry of Mark Haddon's narrator in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time—a boy with Asperger's syndrome. The desire to order the world according to sequences and routines is a well-known symptom of Asperger's, and autism more generally, and Hornby Man may have helped to popularise the notion that autism is an exaggeration of the "male brain"—ironically, because Hornby, as the father of a severely autistic son, might now object to this metaphor about such a debilitating condition. Certainly, as society at large has become ever more fascinated by autism, Hornby's fiction has become less so. (Meanwhile, in real life, he has become an advocate for special education, even building his own school for autistic children.)

Looking back at Nick, Rob, Will and the others, one sees the latent skills of empathy and self-expression buried beneath their displacement exercises. In Fever Pitch, Hornby describes turning to football because his parents' breakup didn't make sense to him. In making sense of football, he could sidestep this gap in his psyche. Similarly, music in High Fidelity allows Rob to avoid growing up; his compilation tapes are not a condition of his masculinity, but a brake on it. And when Will in About a Boy describes himself as "one of life's visitors," it is not an avoidance tactic that the book celebrates.

David in How to be Good exemplifies Hornby Man as he moves into early middle age: pugnacious, underachieving, his only regular income is earned from a column in the local paper published under the byline "The Angriest Man in Holloway." But he is a secondary character to his depressive wife, who carries the narrative. Just as Hergé eventually tired of Tintin, lavishing his attention in the later books on the less idealistic alter ego of Captain Haddock, Hornby seemed by 2001 to be losing patience with Hornby Man, and instead has begun creating a series of women who exhibit many of those same symptoms—alienation, isolation, self-doubt and so on.

A Long Way Down picks up where How to be Good left off, with a woman staring into space. She is soon joined by three other characters whose depression has led them to the top of a tower block on New Year's Eve. Maureen, Martin, Jess and JJ have made their way up there separately, all with thoughts of suicide. In the hours before dawn they are distracted from this task, and agree to reconvene six weeks later, on Valentine's day. On the advice of a "suicidologist," six weeks turns into 90 days, as Hornbury's Hamlets consider whether to end it all.

The first 80 pages of this book are among Hornby's best ever. It is as though in welcoming the depression centre stage, his knack for comedy has been reinvigorated. The elephant is well and truly in the room, and now that we are free to talk about it we can laugh about it too. Nobody would suggest that Hornby's characters have the depth of Tolstoy, or the vigour of Waugh, but these are not absurd comparisons. The exhilarating first part of A Long Way Down has the madcap quality of Decline and Fall at its bitterest, and the rest of the book descends into a meditation on the value of life, albeit using words of few syllables.

It would be wrong to say that Hornby's novels have changed. They have become more sophisticated, certainly, with a wider range of characters and situations, and some conceits that would have pleased GK Chesterton. Yet from the outset his writing has been informed by the core tropes of self-help; in the words of one popular manual, Hornby is all about "learning to love what is." The aesthetic problem with loving what is (as opposed to striving after what might be) is that it can make for a particularly limp conclusion to a novel. If, as readers, we are not allowed to put our faith in transformations, then there's not going to be much in the way of catharsis either. In eschewing the classical consolations of plot, Hornby puts a heavy burden on the writing, which isn't always up to the challenge. His novels have a habit of falling away in the second half. A Long Way Down peaks in the middle, when the suicide survivors put it about that they were saved on the rooftop by an angel looking like Matt Damon. Once this short-lived comic bubble has been burst, they are left floundering.

It should not surprise us that Hornby is taken more seriously in America than in Britain. In 1999 he was given the EM Forster award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and now he has been taken up by the McSweeney's crowd of young writers. Hornbury, with its fragile middle-class obsessives, belongs more in the outer boroughs of Philip Roth's imagination than in the London of Hornby's contemporaries. In their new breed of stories about inchoate but expressive boys, American writers like Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Lethem are echoing some of Hornby's earlier themes.

Structurally and stylistically, A Long Way Down is far from perfect. Yet there are few literary authors who could get away with the kind of melancholic, unredemptive narratives Hornby has been producing for the last decade. To do so within the confines of genre fiction, and to sell these fables in such huge quantities, reveals a kind of genius for identifying and responding to deep cultural anxieties without scaring the readers. Time after time, Hornby tells his readers that even if they can't learn to love what is, they must at least learn to live with it. Should A Long Way Down win the Whitbread? No. Yet Hornby certainly deserves to be taken seriously.