Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl celebrates frothy pop entertainment with its look at a fictional 1960s British TV comedy show.Luke MacGregor/Reuters
An odd but predictable fate awaits many British novelists who, bursting out of the gate with a book that defines a time, an era or an attitude, have decades left to write. Try as they might, they never recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle of the first book.
Kingsley Amis will forever be associated with Lucky Jim. John Braine with Life at the Top. You could argue that Irish writer Roddy Doyle will always be best-known for the Barrytown Trilogy of The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van. Zeitgeist books are rarely transcended or repeated.
This is Nick Hornby's seventh novel and 13th book. With his first book, the non-fiction Fever Pitch in 1992 and with his first novel, High Fidelity in 1995, he changed everything. That is, he changed writing about men of a certain age and their obsessions – music, sports and women. He has avoided being entirely trapped by those books with a couple of deft manoeuvres. His 1998 novel About a Boy took his male-centric themes to a new level of maturity. He began focusing on female characters with How to Be Good, a deeply serious 2001 novel about ethics and integrity in everyday life. And he wrote the superb screenplay for An Education.
Funny Girl is about many things. Mainly it is about television. Specifically British TV and a strong cultural vein of the genre – light comedy that's powerful in its ingenious delicacy. The sort of Britcom that still airs in endless repeats on PBS stations across the United States. The novel is a powerful defence of the genre.
We meet the funny girl herself, Barbara Parker, when she wins Miss Blackpool 1964 (here Hornby is roving into Philip Larkin territory) and promptly resigns in order to run away to London. She idolizes Lucille Ball and has this dream of being a Brit Lucy. One thing leads to another, not all of it implausible, and Barbara becomes Sophie Straw, star of a BBC sitcom called Barbara (and Jim). It's a hit, Sophie becomes a star and, over the course of the novel, the hit show runs out of steam and finally leaves the airwaves. It is replaced in the public's affection by edgier material such as the (real) Steptoe & Son and Till Death Us Do Part.
At its core the novel is a celebration of frothy entertainment – a key scene is a debate on BBC TV about the value of populist entertainment – and a tribute to the skill that goes into creating it. We get little of the actual content of Barbara (and Jim) but we get a keen sense of the craft that goes into sustaining it. This is a book about two men, the show's writers, Tony Holmes and Bill Gardiner, creating TV comedy and polishing and refining it expertly, week after week, year after year. It is about the joy and satisfaction that Barbara/Sophie finds in imbuing the writers' material with her gift for comedy.
It is also about the 1960s. While Barbara (and Jim) is a hit, our heroine occasionally ventures out to hip London clubs where she encounters rock musicians who are famous in a way that she isn't. What she does is for moms and dads. As such, the rather frosty portrait of 1960s Britain is a rebuttal, a refutation of the belief that all that changed in the Sixties was progressive and worthwhile.
Sweetly plotted, much like the sitcom at its centre, Funny Girl isn't always funny. It pauses often to be wistful but never sentimental. It will please Hornby's readers more than Juliet, Naked, that rather dour and deflating last novel. Here, in the way that he eulogized pop music in High Fidelity and soccer in Fever Pitch, he extols the virtues and dynamism of the lightest of TV entertainment. His message is that seriousness is overrated and he delivers it convincingly. It's another clever and entertaining manoeuvre.
John Doyle is The Globe and Mail's television critic and author of A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age.