‘Funny Girl’ A Hilarious Entertainment Odyssey

Despite Nick Hornby’s broad and occasionally derided appeal, the British novelist is never as simple as he seems. Each of Hornby’s books is a subtle combination of an obsessively specific time and place, with a literary style that reflects the locale—“High Fidelity” matches the cool world of London record shop owners with prose made up of Gen X aphorisms, while “About a Boy” pairs teenage angst with Cobain-esque succinctness. The author’s demonstrated penchant for parallel style and subject is why “Funny Girl,” his brilliant new novel, looks initially so shockingly simplistic.

The book, which describes the tale of young Barbara Parker’s sudden rise from a reticent North of England pageant queen, Ms. Blackpool, to a sitcom goddess, reads like a soap opera; Hornby’s descriptions of 1964 London, Barbara’s emergence as a sex symbol under the sibilant pseudonym Sophie Straw, and the introduction of her professional circle is uncharacteristically bland. As Hornby chronicles Sophie and her co-workers’ experience of the mid-1960s revolutionary changes, however, it becomes clear that his prose mimics the burgeoning creativity of the moment. By the end of Sophie’s show in 1968, Hornby’s writing has transformed from the simple sentences of the book’s first chapters to edgier language. His linguistic acrobatics provide the backbone to Straw’s trajectory, which is in turn a searing commentary on the artistic renaissance of the society she embraces.

In the final section of “Funny Girl,” Hornby fast forwards from the dissolution of Sophie’s show, “Barbara (and Jim)”, to examine the elderly Sophie of 2014. The comedic veteran reminisces about her swinging glory days: “To a twenty-two-year-old now, 1965 was like 1915 had been to her when she was starting out. It wasn’t like that, though, was it?” Hornby’s decision to focus briefly on the present at the end of the book comes off as a poignant examination of Sophie’s aging, certainly, and it also historicizes the novel’s suddenly archaic setting. Hornby floods his contemporary epilogue with iPhones, uncreative profanity, and hipster fans of the largely-forgotten 1960s BBC sitcom. His vision isn’t uplifting, but it’s a brilliant look at the changing priorities of youth and the fleeting nature of artistic ingenuity.

Ultimately, Hornby’s comparison between the current decade and the 1960s is successful because the world he creates is so complete. In addition to the mirror that his shifting language provides for the Swinging Sixties, his characters act as tacit reflections of British society. There is Clive Richardson, Sophie’s onscreen husband and offscreen lover, whose misogyny becomes increasingly antithetical to his acting as the emergent sensitive male. The two writers of “Barbara (and Jim),” initially closeted Bill Gardiner and possibly bisexual Tony Holmes, illustrate growing conversations over sexual identity. Hornby uses the show’s producer, Cambridge-educated Dennis Maxwell-Bishop, to cogently lambast the bitter divide between high and low culture. His characters walk through a masterfully re-imagined London, encountering real-life icons like British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Sophie’s comedic idol Lucille Ball, and a bevy of rock stars along the way. Hornby’s equally realistic set-pieces, which include a climactic scene at the premiere of “Hair,” and his inclusion of imagined newspaper reviews, complete the author’s intricate immersion.

While Hornby’s characters could become archetypes who exist solely to illustrate changing perspectives towards sex and art, the sensitivity with which he explains their hopes imbues them with exhilarating individuality. In particular, the relationship between Tony and Bill, whose writing partnership blossoms out of their meeting in jail for separate acts of homosexual solicitation, defies convention. Initially, the duo avoids the topic of sexual orientation, but as their paths diverge—Bill towards literary examination of British gay life and Tony towards an eventually beautiful relationship with his wife, June—they engage in an explosive discourse on love and honesty. Clive and Dennis, too, despite their seeming opposing roles as alpha and emotional males, are more complex than they initially appear. Hornby not only refuses to create cardboard characters but also gives every player side-splitting dialogue; even in the more conventional style of the book’s first act, the cynical repartée between the sitcom’s crew and within their heads is irresistible. The writer establishes his humor within ten pages when he describes Sophie’s doubts about being Ms. Blackpool: “She didn’t dare dwell on her numbness in case she came to the conclusion that she was a hard and hateful bitch.”

Beyond his occasionally hilarious internal observations of Sophie’s world, Hornby’s crafting of his protagonist’s life runs deeper than cheap laughs. He discusses the star’s appearance and emotions more than her hilarity, which in the hands of a lesser writer could come off as a sexist short-circuiting of her supposed charisma. While it is still an odd choice to make the comedic icon of the novel less funny than the other characters, Hornby stops Sophie from becoming a weak protagonist through his constant omniscience—maybe the reader doesn’t get her artistic process, but she sees each step in Sophie’s battle against slimy businessmen, self-doubt, and the public’s probing eye. Though there are enough laughs for several novels packed into the supporting cast, it’s a relief to have a stoic and solid central comedienne—Hornby somehow avoids making Sophie’s rise feel showy, despite the inherent flamboyance of her medium, which allows for unexpected emotional depth.

In Hornby’s decision to craft a somewhat tragic arc for “Barbara (and Jim),” the author references the convention of relaying how commercialism killed a rosy emerging western world. The rise and eventual fall of Sophie’s sitcom is, for all intents and purposes, the birth and death of 1960s U.K. idealism. Hornby sums up this dramatic if familiar novelistic scope when he writes about Sophie’s father’s first London trip: “It was a recurring theme of the visit: people versus people. The people versus her people. London versus the North. Show business versus the world.” That Hornby manages to meditate on all of these dynamics, and do so with literary elasticity, a representative yet unpredictable cast, and supreme knowledge of the era, however, elevates “Funny Girl” above nostalgic acts to be a glorious historical fiction romp.