Funny Girl: A Novel

“There is no such thing as a bad Nick Hornby book, but this will likely be remembered as one of his lesser novels.”

“You could get away with anything, it seemed, if you were on the telly.”

Or so hopes Barbara Parker (soon to be rechristened Sophie Straw), the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s newest novel, Funny Girl.

Barbara Parker has the body of Jayne Mansfield and the face of Bridget Bardot, so it’s not surprising to anyone when she’s to be crowned Miss Blackpool 1964. Unfortunately, Barbara’s Lucille Ball soul won’t let her be satisfied with that.

Fearing that stepping on the stage and accepting the scepter that goes with her title will doom her to a stultifying existence in her Northern English town, Barbara packs her stuff and moves to London, hoping that someone there will let her be more than a face and a figure.

Fortunately for her, within a few months a flirtation with infidelity brings her to the attention of an agent, a change of name, and from there to the leading role in a groundbreaking sitcom.

Funny Girl mainly follows Sophie through the first few years of her career, and with her the cast of characters that enrich her life: Dennis, the show’s very upper-crust, very kind producer; Clive, her skirt-chasing co-star; and most importantly, Tony and Bill, the show’s writers, each of whom is struggling with his own personal challenges.

Within a relatively short period of time, Nick Hornby has become a pillar of contemporary literature, known for his humor, his bright and clever dialogue, and characters that are relatable and well developed. In the case of Funny Girl, only two of these benchmarks are achieved.

Unfortunately, though the story carries all of his trademark wry humor and heart, encapsulated in believable, sharp dialogue, the character of Sophie herself is quite lifeless. In the first chapter there is a hint of her mind and heart:

“She didn’t feel anything. Or rather, she noted her absence of feeling and felt a little sick . . . She didn’t dare dwell on her numbness in case she came to the conclusion she was a hard and hateful bitch . . . she burst into tears, which was her way of telling him that she was as good as gone, that winning Miss Blackpool didn’t even come close to scratching the itch that plagued her like the chicken pox.”

A good beginning, in which Sophie begins to reveal the depths of her ambition to the reader. What is baffling is that is the extent of what is revealed of her character for another 280 pages or so. Following that section, though we see what happens to Sophie, there is very little revealed of what she thinks or feels about any of those events. She has a hit show. How does she feel about it? What is she thinking? No idea.

She meets the prime minister—how does that affect her? No clue. She dates, makes a movie, has a first lover, gets engaged—how do these events change her? Not much. It’s only when she’s cheated upon that her motivations are revealed, and that is better than four-fifths of the way through the book . . . and then she goes two-dimensional again. We don’t see her as a person with feelings and emotions again until the very end of the book, set some 45 years later.

Hornby has many of the same character development issues with the supporting cast, particularly as the book progresses. Dennis and Clive are both introduced with rather illuminating vignettes . . . and then left with sporadic interesting bits. It’s troubling that neither character changes in any way in the roughly 50 years encapsulated in the story, and we never see how having Sophie in either life makes much difference to who they become, despite how profoundly she should have affected both men. In an odd bit of writing, given how important he is and becomes in the life of the primary protagonist, Dennis even exits the story completely offstage.

Bill and Tony are treated more kindly, and indeed their story is frankly far more absorbing than Sophie’s. As a homosexual man and an asexual man in 1960s Britain at the dawn of the sexual revolution, the challenges both face are fascinating, and Hornby handles their lives with care and grace. Both are well-rounded characters, neither angels nor devils, and both men have a lot to say about being a man who lives outside the norm for their society. It would have been interesting to hear even more from these characters; given that they are by far the most developed characters in the story, it seems that perhaps Hornby himself found them more interesting than Sophie.

And therein lies the crux of the problem with Funny Girl: there is a noticeable lack of focus. Hornby’s other novels all have a point, an idea that lies at the heart of the novel and drives the story. In books like High Fidelity and About a Boy, the core of the story is about becoming an adult; A Long Way Down’s focuses on facing life for what it is and finding ones own place.

There is no such focus for Funny Girl, or rather, the focus is hard to define. Is it about people being more than the sum of their looks? Is it about the plight of gay and asexual men in society? Is it about infidelity and what that does to people and relationships? Is it about popular culture and how television reflects, defines, and is changed by that? All of the above, perhaps, but by shooting so many arrows in one just over 300-page book, Hornby misses the mark on all accounts.

Finally, there is the problem of writing about contemporary history without personal experience. Sophie, with all her quirks, problems, and personal history, is directly reminiscent of the plucky Irish lasses about whom Maeve Binchy wrote so well; the difference is that Binchy lived that life—she was a young woman in 60s UK, so her characters and stories have a ring of authenticity that is missing from Funny Girl.

Hornby handles writing a script and developing a television show well. Those are within his purview. Unfortunately, though, no matter how many Yardbirds’ or 60s television shows he name drops, there is not a similar feeling of authenticity in the rest of the story. Recent history is a very tricky setting; there are still too many people living (and writing) who lived it and have personal experience to draw upon for inauthenticity to pass.

Funny Girl is full of the sharp dialogue for which Nick Hornby is rightly known. Bill and Tony, Sophie’s writer friends, are interesting characters, and their story is absorbing. Sophie Straw, the funny girl herself, unfortunately remains a cypher for much of the story, and that’s too bad. There is no such thing as a bad Nick Hornby book, but this will likely be remembered as one of his lesser novels.