Funny Girl
Nicky Hornby, 2014
Penguin Group (USA)
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594205415
Summary
Set in 1960's London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingenue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters.
Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby's latest does what he does best: endears us to a cast of characters who are funny if flawed, and forces us to examine ourselves in the process. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 17, 1957
• Where—Surrey, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Cambridge
• Awards—E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• Currently—lives in London, England
Nick Hornby is an English novelist, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels High Fidelity and About a Boy. Hornby's work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists. His books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide.
Early life and education
Hornby was born in Redhill, Surrey, England. He was brought up in Maidenhead, and educated at Maidenhead Grammar School and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English. His parents divorced when he was 11.
Books
Hornby's first published book, 1992's Fever Pitch, is an autobiographical story detailing his fanatical support for Arsenal Football Club, and earning Hornby the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. The memoir was adapted for film in the UK in 1997, with a 2005 American remake with Jimmy Fallon as an obsessed Boston Red Sox fan.
After the success of Fever Pitch, Hornby began publishing articles in the Sunday Times, Time Out and the Times Literary Supplement. He also wrote music reviews for The New Yorker.
High Fidelity—his second book and first novel—was published in 1995. About a neurotic record collector and his failed relationships, the book was adapted into a 2000 film, starring John Cusack, and a 2006 Broadway musical.
His second novel, About a Boy, published in 1998, is about two "boys"—Marcus, an awkward yet endearing adolescent from a single-parent family, and Will Freeman, afree-floating, mid-30s who overcomes his own immaturity and self-centeredness through his growing relationship with Marcus. Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult starred in the 2002 film version.
In 1999, Hornby received the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Hornby's next novel, How to Be Good, came out in 2001. The female protagonist in the novel explores contemporary morals, marriage and parenthood. It won the W.H. Smith Award for Fiction in 2002.
In 2002 Hornby edited Speaking with the Angel, twelve short stories written by friends. A portion of the money from the book went to TreeHouse, a charity for children with autism, the disorder that affects his own son.
In 2003, Hornby wrote a collection of essays on selected popular songs and the emotional resonance they carry, called 31 Songs (Songbook in the US). Also in 2003, Hornby was awarded the London Award 2003, an award that was selected by fellow writers.
Hornby has also written essays on various aspects of popular culture, in particular on pop music and mixed tapes. Since 2003, he has written a book review column, "Stuff I've Been Reading", for the monthly magazine The Believer; all of these articles are collected in The Polysyllabic Spree (2004), Housekeeping vs. The Dirt (2006), Shakespeare Wrote for Money (2008), and More Baths Less Talking (2012).
Hornby's novel A Long Way Down was published in 2005 and made the shortlist for the Whitbread Award. The film version, starring Pierce Brosnan and Toni Collett, was released in 2014. Hornby has also edited two sports-related anthologies: My Favourite Year and The Picador Book of Sports Writing.
Hornby's book Slam his first novel for young adults, was published in 2007. It was recognized as a 2008 ALA Best Books for Young Adults. The protagonist of Slam is a 16-year-old skateboarder named Sam whose life changes drastically when his girlfriend gets pregnant.
Hornby's next novel, Juliet, Naked, was published in September 2009. On the same wavelength as his first novel High Fidelity, the book follows a reclusive '80s rock star who is forced out of isolation when the re-release of his most famous album brings him into contact with some of his most passionate fans.
In 2010, Hornby co-founded the Ministry of Stories, a non-profit organisation in East London dedicated to helping children and young adults develop writing skills and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.
Hornby discussed his bouts of depression in 2012 on the BBC Radio 4 broadcast of "Fever Pitched: Twenty Years On."
Hornby's seventh novel, Funny Girl, about a Sixties beauty queen determined to make her mark upon television comedy, was released in 2014.
Music
The importance of music in Hornby's novels, and in his life, is evidenced by his long-standing and fruitful collaborations with the rock band Marah, fronted by Dave and Serge Bielanko. Hornby has even toured in the US and Europe with the band, joining them on stage to read his essays about particular moments and performers in his own musical history that have had a particular meaning for him.
Hornby's music criticism (most notably for The New Yorker and in his own Songbook) has been widely criticised by writers such as Kevin Dettmar (in his book Is Rock Dead), Curtis White (in an essay at www.centreforbookculture.org, titled "Kid Adorno"), Barry Faulk and Simon Reynolds for his embrace of rock traditionalism and his conservative take on post-rock and other experimental musics (exemplified in Hornby's negative review of the Radiohead album Kid A).
Hornby has also had extensive collaboration with American singer/songwriter Ben Folds. Their album Lonely Avenue was released in September 2010. Folds wrote the music, with Hornby contributing lyrics.
Personal
Hornby has been married twice. He and his first wife have one son, born in 1992, who has autism. Hornby's second wife is producer Amanda Posey. They have two sons, born in 2003 and 2005.
Hornby was directly involved in the creation of the charity Ambitious about Autism, then known as TreeHouse Trust, and its school TreeHouse School, as a result of trying to find specialist education for his son Danny. Hornby remains a major donor to the charity and is still involved as a vice president. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/10/15.)
Book Reviews
In Funny Girl, Nick Hornby uses the story of a reluctant beauty queen from Blackpool as the hook for a rambunctious cultural history of British television comedy 50 years ago. As befits a novel about a popular sitcom, this novel packs in lots of laughs, but it's also got more heft than Mr. Hornby's readers may expect
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Funny and fast moving, perceptive and sharp.
Los Angeles Times
A smart comic novel that...induces binge-reading that's the literary equivalent of polishing off an entire television series in one weekend.
NPR
Beautifully captures the thrill of youthful success and of discovering your own talent.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
Funny Girl may be read as Hornby's latest defence of popular entertainment against high-culture elitism. Funny Girl makes his case for him eloquently and entertainingly...both hugely enjoyable and deceptively artful.
Spectator (UK)
I loved this hymn to the 1960s, their infinite creative possibilities.
Scotsman (UK)
Endearing, humorous and touching. Hugely enjoyable.
Sunday Mirror (UK)
Engaging...Hornby’s fictionalized evocation of the era is spot-on.
Entertainment Weekly
[A] light, fond, funny tale by the author of About a Boy…[a] fizzy delight about the likable oddballs who populate showbiz.
People
Theera and the theme (surfing the crest of a revolution, then getting dumped in its wake) are pure Mad Men, but the pulpy warmth and sprightly dialogue are classic Hornby.
Vulture
(Starred review.) Hornby wonderfully captures the voice and rhythms of broadcast television of the time, and seems to delight in endless inversions of art imitating life imitating art.... The result is a delightful collection of characters that care as much as they harm, each struggling to determine who they want to be.
Publishers Weekly
For a novel about comedy, the humor is off camera, implied but not evident. Hornby's usual spark is missing. A readable but melancholy and definitely not funny book. —Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Art and life are intertwined in a novel about TV sitcoms set during the cultural sea change of the 1960s. Hornby's...most ambitious novel to date extends his passion for pop culture and empathy for flawed characters in to the world of television comedy. "It's funny, and sad—like life." And like this novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Early in Funny Girl, before recording Barbara (and Jim) for Comedy Playhouse, Sophie Straw says of the show, “I don’t want it to go out into the world . . . I want to stay like we were” (see page 107). What is Sophie trying to preserve? What is she afraid of losing?
2. There are some in the book who are irritated by Barbara (and Jim)’s popularity (Edith Maxwell-Bishop and Vernon Whitfield, for example) and who seem to believe that entertainment should be more traditional and less bawdy. Whitfield also says of the show’s audience, “I love ordinary people individually. It’s ordinary people en masse that trouble me” (page 207). Does the narrator take a stand on this sentiment? How is it conveyed?
3. On page 150, a reviewer for The Times writes: “The very existence of Barbara (and Jim) indicates the birth of a modern Britain, one prepared to acknowledge that its citizens are as sex-obsessed as our neighbors across the Channel . . .” In what other ways does Funny Girl illustrate Britain’s transition from the austere 1950s to the Swinging ’60s? From the ’60s to the 2010s?
4. What do you make of the inclusion of real historical evidence (photographs, cartoons, and images of the 1960s) alongside fictional text? Does it blur the line between fact and fiction?
5. At the launch party for Bill Gardiner’s book, Diary of a Soho Boy, Tony Holmes does not feel jealous toward his colleague’s success but does feel jealous upon seeing a “beautiful young colored girl” (see page 368) and wonders, Why didn’t he know any young, colored women? What does this tell us about both Bill and Tony and about the milieu of Britain at the time?
6. Much of Funny Girl’s energy lies in the bantering dialogue between characters. How do these exchanges allow the characters to define themselves in ways the narrator cannot? For example, Sophie’s agent, Brian Debenham, is repeatedly telling young women, “I’m a happily married man” (see page 48, for example). What other character traits can we glean from such dialogue?
7. On page 208, when Dennis Maxwell-Bishop and Vernon Whitfield appear on Pipe Smoke to argue over the current state of entertainment, Whitfield says, “But . . . where are we going with all of this? The BBC is full of horse-racing and variety shows and pop groups who look and sounds like cavemen. What will it look like in ten years’ time? Fifty? You’re already making jokes about lavatories and God knows what. How long before you people decide it’s all right to show people taking a shit, so long as some hyena in the audience thinks it’s hysterical?” How does his argument address not just the fictional plot but entertainment as we know it today? Is Funny Girl a defense of lighthearted entertainment?
8. A recurring question the characters face while producing Barbara (and Jim) is whether comedy can be intelligent. How is this addressed throughout Funny Girl? How would you respond to the question?
9. Sophie quietly struggles with feeling that she is relevant to the world of comedy. She’s disappointed when she meets Lucille Ball—her idol—after it becomes clear Lucy hasn’t seen Barbara (and Jim). But when Sophie and the team meet the Prime Minister, she is heartened that the “invitation was official acknowledgment that they mattered” (page 288), despite realizing the Prime Minister doesn’t watch the show either. Why do you think Sophie feels this way?
10.Funny Girl to narrate the book this way? How might it read differently if it had been told in the first person—say, if it had been told by Sophie?
11. As a “quick-witted, unpretentious, high-spirited, funny, curvy, clever, beautiful blonde” (page 257), Sophie might strike some readers as almost too good to be true. Is she? How does Hornby address this anomaly?
12. What dawning realization allows Sophie’s anger toward her mother, Gloria Balderstone, to soften? What does this tell us about Sophie? What does this tell us about the eras from which these two women came?
13. How do both the imaginary sitcom Barbara (and Jim) and the novel Funny Girl deal with issues of sex and class in Britain?
14. How does the relationship between Tony and Bill change over the course of Funny Girl?
15. The narrator tells us that, as an older woman, Sophie thinks that entertainment has “taken over the world, and she wasn’t sure that the world was a better place for it” (page 442). Do you agree with her assessment? Why or why not?
16. Funny Girl captures the excitement of youthful success and of burgeoning talent, but it also considers what it’s like once that excitement fades. How would you describe the mood at the end of the book as Barbara (and Jim)’s glory days inevitably pass?
17. What do you imagine Sophie did with the teapot in the opening scene of Barbara and Jim—The Reunion! to get them “off and running” (page 452)?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)