Comments on: Nick Hornby vs. Danielle Steele

By: Kelly

Kelly — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 22:06:50 +0000

I’m not so sure these are guy novels. Not all of them, anyway — I absolutely loved Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity.” The American imitators, or whatever they are, don’t sound nearly as appealing, though.

I think I’m with Joanne on this, but I’d take it further. It’s not just women who don’t want to read these books — it’s the world at large, as can be seen by the books’ poor sales. Who wants to read what sounds basically like a long interior monologue by a bored and boring slacker? Most of us can experience that every day.

By: Jeff in Texas

Jeff in Texas — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 17:12:34 +0000

The “offensive” part is a little offensive, but it is a fact that when my wife finishes reading a Hornby book or others of the genre (which I have usually read first, laughing my ass off all the way through it and telling her how great it is), she almost always says something along the lines of “I like it; but what is the point, really?” And I end up responding, “well, it’s the characters you know; there is no point; that’s the point” or something equally enlightening. They really are guy novels I guess.

By: eliza rae mahony

eliza rae mahony — Mon, 29 May 2006 19:30:21 +0000

another small flaw in the argument – holden caulfield is a jerk. if you read the book as an adolescent, you tend to identify with him (’yeah! the world isfull of phonies!’), but if you read it as an adult (as i recently did) you are likely tend to find him as insufferable as does carl luce, the poor columbia student who meets him for a drink. this is the genius of the novel, of course, and highlights the point you raised above, ie. that the first thing a reader should do when confronted with a first person narrator is the question just how reliable that narrator is.

By: joanne mcneil

joanne mcneil — Sat, 27 May 2006 04:08:08 +0000

Hey! Your ellipses edits out the best part of that article — the Laura Miller quote: “If female readers allowed themselves to believe that most straight men spend their time holding conversations with their penises, watching the Cartoon Network, fiddling with their rotisserie baseball teams, and contemplating the fine art of passing gas on subway trains, romance Ã¢â?¬â? and perhaps even human reproduction itself Ã¢â?¬â? would grind to a halt.”

Ok, he states it dumbly, but the point is sound: no gal wants to read the narrative by the kind of slob that oggles her in bars (unless, of course. by some magic he sees the error of his boorish ways.) It’s not that they are unattractive so much as they are not interesting. Growth involves conflict; something none of these writers bother to develop.

He should have stricken the parenthetical and added “fiction” after “men don’t read.”