Hornby's magic tracks

We are starved of good essayists on this side of the Atlantic. Instead of American gourmet dining - Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, John Updike, David Mamet - we have the cheap, fast food of professional controversialists and opinionated hacks. There are a few exceptions - Martin Amis and Ian Jack come most readily to mind. But somehow it is a part of our literary culture that has withered on the vine - bewilderingly so, given the enormous bulk and potential of our printed media.

A good essay is to an "opinion piece" what doggerel is to poetry. Opinion is merely that - some fleeting perception, liable to decay to pulp along with the page on which it is printed, full of air, flyaway and, all too frequently, trite. An essay aspires to some of the disciplines of literature - that it will be enduring, that it will reach the heart as well as the head, that it will approach the condition of truth both in its clarity of language and depth of perception.

Now Nick Hornby rather bravely attempts to plant a few seeds in this difficult and sparsely populated field with this collection of essays on the songs that are most meaningful to him (note "meaningful" - it's not simply a playlist of favourites). Hornby is a fine writer, but I approached 31 Songs with some trepidation. Could he really justify a cover price of £12.99 for a slender book enthusing about a few pop songs?

The answer is an unqualified yes.

Hornby's 31 Songs is a triumph, and quite the most enjoyable book he has written since High Fidelity. It succeeds because it is not simply about music. It is about him, and us, and - at its best - about being alive. It has density, it has weight and it has heart. In some way, it is itself like a fine pop song - nourishing, life affirming and beautifully simple. In other ways it goes further, because it works on several levels (and pop at its best is only ever fully itself).

Take, for instance, his essay about Frankie Teardrop by Suicide. This isn't a fan letter - in a way, Hornby clearly dislikes this track and everything it stands for. But he recognises that at one point in his life its bleak, atonal cheerlessness spoke to him. However, he has grown up - "I don't want to be terrified by art any more... I need no convincing that life is scary ... I don't need anyone trying to jolt me out of my complacency. Friends have started to die of incurable diseases ... my son has been diagnosed with a severe disability ... some of us, as we get older, simply find that we don't have that much courage to spare any more."

So this is really an essay about the burdens of experience over innocence, just as the essay on One Man Guy by Rufus Wainwright is, in Hornby's artless way, about God - although approached in his usual demotic, witty cut-the-crap style: "I don't normally have much patience for the ineffable - I ought to think everything's effing effable ... but I'm not sure there are words to describe what happens when two voices mesh

... All I can say is that I can hear things that aren't there, see and feel things I normally can't see and feel, and start to realise that, yes, there is such a thing as an immortal soul, or, at the very least, a unifying human consciousness, that our lives are short but have meaning."

I don't want to push the deep and meaningful angle too much. This collection has many attractions other than the coral of profundity beneath its deceptively simple surface. It's funny, of course. ("I have a friend who stays logged on to the Dylan website Expecting Rain most of the day at work - as if the website were CNN and Dylan's career were the Middle East".) And, equally predictably, it's immensely readable.

I would have to take issue, of course, with some of his choices. Aimee Mann's I've Had It seems a long way from her finest hour, and Nelly Furtado's I'm Like a Bird appears an eccentrically slight inclusion. But others I would have to applaud loudly - the Avalanches' Frontier Psychiatrist and Pissing in a River by Patti Smith, for instance. All the essays are provoking, and an inspiration to a lapsed music fan like myself. Since finishing it, I have ordered five of the CDs he has written about and I dare say I'll order a fair number more. His enthusiasm is such that he makes me want to be a better listener - and I think I can offer no better compliment.

Peculiarly, I have met writers who take violent exception to Hornby. Usually they are writers who consider themselves to be his intellectual superior and who write Big, Important and Very Fashionably Disillusioned Books about death, misery and art. I sometimes wonder what they get so worked up about - what's not to like about Nick Hornby?

But then, on reflection, the answer is obvious. Hornby in a sentence can touch on truths that other writers angle for over the length of a book. In short, like most of the songs in this collection, he has soul - which is why he is loved. And a disillusioned intellectual is like an Emerson, Lake and Palmer fan harrumphing over punk - because he knows in his heart of hearts that, despite all that complexity and classical training, they'll never come close to the simple heavenly resonance of those three perfect chords.