Whatever the Ride, Let TV be Your Guide

Beauty queen Barbara Parker wants more from life than a hometown crown.  She wants to be on TV, to make people laugh, to be the next Lucille Ball.  So she leaves the backwater of Blackpool for London to make it happen.

So begins Nick Hornby's Funny Girl.  You can see why I thought it'd be about Barbara and her thoughts and feelings.  But it's about something much bigger, namely pop culture and fame and how it all changed in the '60s. 

A true ensemble, Funny Girl follows Barbara's -- or, rather, the newly christened Sophie Straw's -- TV family though the ups and downs of showbiz and life.  Poignant, nostalgic, and sparkling with wit, it captures the excitement of being young and hungry -- and, in the end, the realization that the best part was those early days and their struggles.

Because from the start, they knew their show was special.  Hornby describes the magic through script writer Tony, reminding us why sitcoms have our hearts:

"It was the . . . promise of next week, another episode, another series (season); it couldn't help but offer hope, to its characters and to everyone who identified with them.  Tony didn't think he would ever want to write anything apart from half-hour comedies.  They contained the key to health, wealth, and happiness." (198)

Exactly.  Sitcoms make the world go 'round.

So let those reruns ring.

Little Boy Blue and a Grown Man Too: Empathy Never Gets Old

Thirty-six-year-old Will.  Twelve-year-old Marcus.  They seem to have nothing in common and meet only because Will joins SPAT (Single Parents Alone Together) to pick up chicks.  But a traumatic event in Marcus's life bonds and changes them forever.  Can a twelve-year-old outcast with a weird mother and an absentee father ever find peace?  And can a grown man who's never had a job or a real relationship find something to fill his life other than cool clothes, music, and TV?  Nick Hornby's About a Boy intends to find out.  Now, I know what you may be thinking.  Tote Trove Lady, didn't you already blog about this when you reviewed Hornby's High Fidelity and Juliet, Naked and also the non-Hornby but hauntingly similar The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta?  Well, yeah.  But the whole arrested development theme is one that's near and dear to my heart.  Furthermore, this book's about more than a manchild; it's also about a boy.  It says so in the title.

When we meet Will, he's disgusted by parenthood.  He hates the way colorful toys litter the once-hip home of his best mate and the way a squalling infant can turn otherwise intelligent people into idiots.  And perhaps, most importantly, he hates the way children chip away at one's individuality and freedom, usurping every ounce of time and energy until even listening to a favorite record becomes an act of sedition.  And so, at thirty-six, he's contentedly childless and single, living off the royalties from his father's smash hit "Santa's Super Sleigh."  Unlike everyone else he knows, he has no complications and feels like he's got the secret to life figured out.  If you're having trouble picturing such a man, then I invite you to envision Hugh Grant, who played Will in the 2002 movie.  You know, charming and hangdog and harmless.  Unlike the real Hugh Grant, i.e., the horndog who got caught with that prostitute. 

That said, here are some of my favorite parts:      

This is a Will thought that's funny and (although I have a job) relatable:

". . . he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job.  Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day?  He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavory shortcuts." (81)

Then again, Will also thinks this:

"That was the point of fashion, as far as Will was concerned; it meant that you were with the cool and the powerful, and against the alienated and the weak, just where Will wanted to be, and he'd successfully avoided being bullied by bullying furiously and enthusiastically." (141)  

It seems that Will isn't so harmless after all.  As an ex-bully and emotional drifter, not to mention a clotheshorse for all the wrong reasons, he's unequivocally part of the problem.  That's why he needs to learn from Marcus, a boy bullied so mercilessly that he gets a crush on his older protector, Ellie.  It's Ellie who introduces Marcus to Nirvana; she wears a Kurt Cobain sweatshirt every day.  (Did I mention that this book takes place in 1993 and 1994?).  At first, Will finds any correlation between Cobain and Marcus odd (he too is a Nirvana fan) but later realizes that it makes a strange sort of sense.  When Cobain's suicide spurs Ellie and Marcus on an ill-advised adventure, Will makes this observation:

"It was hard to imagine two less kindred spirits than Marcus and Kurt Cobain, and yet they had both managed to pull off the same trick: Marcus forced unlikely connections in cars and police stations and Kurt Cobain did the same thing on international television." (287)

Marcus and Cobain make people feel, even people who don't know them -- or themselves.  And that's just what Will needs in his life.  Just as Marcus needs Will's confidence, however misguided. 

So, what happens to Will at the end of this heart-warming if offbeat and sometimes sad story?  For once I'm not going to tell you.  I'll just say that About a Boy isn't about having a kid or being a kid or even growing up, but learning to look at things differently.

While still making time for clothes and TV and, of course, communing with Kurt.

Top Forty, Top Five, Prepare for the Dive: Growing Up is Hard to Do

I've always wanted to read Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity, and last week I finally did.  Although I saw the movie first, I ended up preferring the book.  Truth be told, I couldn't get through the movie, which is rare for me.  I fell asleep and woke up thinking, oh, John Cusack's still whining.  Time to switch to Curb Your Enthusiasm!  You know.  For an entirely different kind of, albeit more entertaining, whining. 

High Fidelity, for those who don't know, is the first-person account of a newly-dumped, music-obsessed, thirty-five-year-old manchild named Rob who owns a struggling record store in the '90s.  Rob spends most of his time with his two Championship Vinyl employees, dudes who are even more hopeless than he is, making fun of people who like bubblegum pop and creating top five lists of their favorite songs, albums, and Cheers episodes.  So in an effort to pinpoint how and when his love life went wrong, Rob describes his top five failed relationships in excruciating detail, casting his exes as the villains.  If this whole commitmentphobe-guy-in-his-thirties-who-loves-music-more-than-he-loves-love thing sounds like Tom Perrotta's The Wishbones, then that's because it is.  Only British and broodier -- and, to be fair, published three years earlier.  

As the story unravels, Hornby hints that Rob is an unreliable narrator, slowly acquainting us with all the reasons why these breakups may actually be his fault.  Getting to know Rob and his problems requires going on a journey with not only this one very specific and very self-absorbed man, but with men in general.  According to Rob, men don't expect women to look perfect or even to deliver mind-blowing sex.  It's just that they can't shake the thrill of meeting (and yes, sleeping with) a new woman every so often.  In other words, Rob is exasperating -- but he's also human.  And through Hornby's satiric yet sensitive eyes, he sometimes becomes sympathetic.  

It should come as no surprise, then, that despite my distaste for Rob's misogynistic behavior, there's a part of me that still kind of gets him.  Not the thing about wanting to play the field, but the thing about not wanting to lose his independence.  Because for him, independence is music.  It's the language that helps him understand the world, and I respect what it means to him:  

 " . . . sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time." 63

So true, Rob/Hornby, so true.  The best songs defy space and time, transporting us to a place where everything's possible.  And that, in a nutshell, describes Rob's dilemma: he's a guy who, like most of us, wants it all.  So he gives up what he's got for what he might get.  But it doesn't make him happy.  Will he ever be able to sacrifice the possibility of the polygamous past for the certainty of a monogamous future? 

Probably (no spoiler here; you know how these stories go).  Because music will always sound sweeter coming from a record player than a computer -- but you're never too old to grow up.  

Reformed Rocker Shocker: One for the Record Books

So, I just read Juliet, Naked.  I watched the movie first, back before I knew that it was a novel written by Nick Hornby, who also wrote High Fidelity, which was also a book unbeknownst to me.  But enough navel gazing; Juliet, Naked is a delight!  Funny, self-deprecating, and all of those other British things that make you want to wield a teacup.  Here's the skinny:  

Annie and Duncan live in Gooleness, a seaside town populated by geriatrics, and have been together for fifteen years.  Duncan is obsessed with a washed-up, allegedly reclusive American rocker named Tucker Crowe and runs a website dedicated to him.  Annie is sick of Duncan's Tucker obsession.  One day, Duncan receives a never-before-released raw cut of Tucker's most famous album, "Juliet," (hereafter referred to as "Juliet, Naked"), and Annie opens it first, listens to it, and hates it.  Duncan is indignant, all but calling Annie a philistine, and posts a cloying review.  Annie retaliates by writing and posting a scathing review of her own.  Then wonder of wonders, Tucker writes back, beginning the most bizarre love triangle since Little Shop of Horrors.

Before Annie and Tucker know it, they're in an email relationship.  Spilling their guts and having a trans-Atlantic emotional affair or whatever.  Annie is thirty-nine and suddenly depressed about being childless.  Tucker is a sad dad with five kids from four different mothers.  He lets his fans think he's morphed into an angry backwoodsman even though he looks like an accountant.  Tucker is also disgusted by the mythology surrounding his exodus from the music scene, and Annie, well, Annie's just lonely.  Meanwhile, Duncan (What kind of name is that anyway?  It makes me think of one-hit-wonder Duncan Sheik or that dude from Hamlet or, yes, even Duncan Hines) shacks up with a fellow professor, a red herring of a plot device stalling his inevitable shock upon finding out that his ex-ladylove and his hero -- no, make that man crush -- are now pen pals.  

But, as usual, I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let's pause to peruse some of my favorite parts, shall we?

Duncan on reading Annie's review:

"She was better than him in everything but judgment -- the only thing that mattered in the end, but still.  She wrote well, with fluency and humor, and she was persuasive, if you hadn't actually heard the music, and she was likeable.  He tended to be strident and bullying and smark-alecky, even he could see that.  This wasn't what she was supposed to be good at.  Where did that leave him?" (68)

Poor Duncan.  His woman has dared to defy him about his most favorite thing, wittily and winsomely, on the Internet for all to read.  And I love it.  These days, I can't help reading through a feminist lens.  Even though I wrote my college thesis on why Lady Audley was an opportunist as opposed to a victim and used to side with Ross when he said that he and Rachel were on a break.  I guess facing forty has dropped some hard truths on me.  

And now for Tucker's first impression of Gooleness, which amuses me for obvious reasons:

"If he translated some of the ethnic foods into Americans' favorites and swapped a few of the bookies for casinos, he'd be at one of the trashier resorts in New Jersey.  Every now and again, one of Jackson's school friends got dragged off to a seaside town like this, either because the kid's parents had misremembered a vacation from their youth, or because they had failed to spot the romanticism and poetic license in Bruce Springsteen's early albums." (324)

Ah, Jersey.  Always a punching bag.  Or, more to the point, a trash bag.  

Now back to our analysis.

Juliet, Naked isn't just about the -- in this case, incredibly ironic -- ebb and flow of romantic relationships.  It's about art and what it means once artists release it to the world.  For instance, it's hilarious, intrusive, and a little concerning that Duncan and his fellow Crowologists (yes, that's what they call themselves) go to such lengths to research (okay, stalk) Tucker and theorize what he's been up to.  They've put him on such a pedestal that he's no longer a person, and they're willing to worship his worst work.  That said, they're also passionate, and it's their passion that's kept Tucker and his music relevant.  So it's up to Annie to choose between the fanatic and the source of the fanaticism, or, rather, the satellite and the sun.  Duncan's a drip, no question.  But he's a drip who stands for something.  And artist or not, Tucker's got his problems, and not all of them are the sexy kind worthy of lighters.  Annie's ultimate decision says a lot about what she wants out of life and what she's willing to do to get it.

Sounds like girl power hour to me.