The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

The literary Richard Littlejohn

Before Nick Hornby became a successful author, he was an unsuccessful critic. We know this because his struggles in the world of freelance journalism supplied the backdrop for his first book, Fever Pitch. One of the things people found most endearing about this football-fixated debut was its willingness to face up how far short adult realities can fall of the dreams of youth. But Fever Pitch's huge popularity - and Hornby's subsequent career as a best-selling novelist - set him a different and more unusual challenge: how to react when reality starts to surpass your wildest fantasies?

All too often, in the pages of Hornby's "Diary of an Occasionally Exasperated but Ever Hopeful Reader", the author's response to the dramatic upturn in his fortunes recalls that of a spoilt child at Christmas who gets all the lavish gifts they asked for, then has a tantrum at the sight of a less prosperous schoolfriend playing with an old toy car. He ends his introduction with an impassioned plea to anyone who is struggling with a "difficult", or perhaps even (perish the thought) "literary" book to "Please, please, put it down". It doesn't actually say "and pick up one of mine instead", but it might as well do.

This is just one of many occasions when Hornby's bare motivation hangs out for all to see. "I'm happy that we're living through these times of exceptionally written and imaginitive memoirs," he proclaims grandly at one point (in a phrase which may or may not be a brilliant parody of The Diary of a Nobody). By the time Hornby is musing that "Maybe a literary novel is just a novel that doesn't really work," even the most guileless of readers will be starting to suspect him of having some kind of axe to grind.

For a book which presents itself as one long cry of rage against a cultural establishment from which Hornby inexplicably feels himself excluded, this feels more like the work of an insider than an outsider. It began life as a series of monthly columns in the American literary magazine The Believer, a publication which (ironically, given Hornby's apparent vendetta against all literary writing) prides itself on offering a high-minded refuge from the habitual negativity of the reviewing trade. Each column begins with two lists: one of books bought in the previous month, the other of books read, and Hornby discusses his feelings about them with reference to conversations he has had with his brother in law (the famous author Robert Harris), and his own experiences at football matches, pub-rock gigs, and enjoyable Icelandic literary festivals.

Sometimes excerpts are included from the volumes he has mentioned. The presence of one of these (a gratuitous plug for a friend's work in which Hornby makes a cameo appearance) is so embarrassing I have not dared to reopen the book at that page in case it is still there. But many of them (Chekhov dispensing advice, an extract from the graphic novel Persepolis) are excellent. And the fact that this ends up being, as a whole, not nearly as bad or pernicious a book as its introduction suggests, makes Hornby's determination to present himself as a kind of literary Richard Littlejohn even more frustrating.

When Hornby dares to remove his neurotic populist blinkers, he actually has some perfectly interesting things to say. The idiosyncratic proposition that "All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal..." is perhaps the most beguiling equation of consumerism with personal growth that Hornby has yet come up with.

So how to square the likeable dreamer who believes that "with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not", with the vengeful curmudgeon who insists "Usually, books have gone out of print for a reason, and that reason is they're no good"? What links the salt-of-the-earth Cambridge English graduate and purveyor of blokeish disingenuity ("Books [are] pretty good, but not as good as other stuff, like goals or bootlegs"), with the splenetic John Carey disciple, whose outrage at someone daring to criticise the flat and lifeless (but popular!) paintings of Jack Vettriano prompts him to exclaim, in a deranged outburst of gonzo relativism, "Nothing about art is true, and nothing about art is false"?

The key to these contradictions presumably lies in Hornby's inability to reconcile the huge cultural clout he now wields as a writer of popular fiction which gives pleasure to millions, with the powerlessness he used to feel as an anonymous hack. But the more he tries to scratch that itch, the worse the pain gets. Reading 31 Songs (his earlier, similarly doomed attempt to recast rock journalism in his own image) was like watching the grisly climax of Saturday Night Fever. Greil Marcus, Jon Savage and Paul Morley are all waiting in the car, sharing a joke. The not-so-cool kid is up on the bridge and he's shouting: "Look guys, I'm here! Up on the bridge - telling everyone what a great song Nelly Furtado's 'I'm Like A Bird' is!" Then there's silence, followed by an awful splash.

This time around, happily, Hornby comes to a less sticky end. The Complete Polysyllabic Spree is a problem which contains its own solution. On page 215, realising that the hours he's devoted to getting to grips with Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (which I haven't read, so I can't vouch for his judgement) have actually been time well spent, Hornby concedes that "Sometimes a book just can't help being literary... because its ideas defy simple expression." As fireworks go off and Penguin cancel plans for a projected Polysyllabic Spree tie-in restaurant guide ("Never mind this fancy foreign muck, the chips at Happy Eater are delicious"), intellectual detente seems a real possibility.

When Hornby writes about "the culture war we still, after all these years, seem to be fighting", he imagines an epic wide-screen conflict between an all-powerful, cultural elite on one side, and humble writers of popular fiction on the other. The first image this absurdly out-of-date notion calls to mind is that of Japanese soldiers emerging from the Guam jungle, years after Hiroshima, unaware of the end of the war. But there's one big flaw in that analogy. The Japanese soldiers weren't on the winning side.