If I call you Sunny Jim in the near future, blame Nick Hornby.
A character in his book “Funny Girl” is out on a date with Sophie, an actress at the center of the story who ends up chatting with another guy. Her date returns, and when the other guy doesn’t get the hint to leave, he says, “I think you should clear off now, Sunny Jim.”
Hornby is one of my favorite authors, and perhaps because of his Britishness his writing features words I don’t come across every day. Another example comes from when the gorgeous Sophie is in a beauty pageant in a tiny town and ends up in a discussion on the sidelines with her father.
“The holidaymakers within earshot had given up all pretense of knitting and reading the papers now. They were just gawping at her.”
Gawptastic.
Sophie is an actress who moves from her tiny town to London in search of a big break. She is obsessed with Lucille Ball in a way that other people don’t understand. She has conversations about I Love Lucy the way I do about The Simpsons. Sometimes that doesn’t go over so well.
“She was so serious about watching comedy on the television that people thought she was a bit odd, so she’d stopped talking about it.”
Sophie ends up at a party with stuffy BBC intellectual types where she feels very much out of place. She’s not sure what kind of wine she’s drinking, and a year ago I wouldn’t have either, but a friend invited me to a fancy party where we drank Beaujolais and ate different kinds of dumplings. I brought Doritos Loaded that I got at a 7-Eleven on the walk there because I’m an adult like that.
“Red wine,” said Sophie, holding out the glass.
“Was it the Beaujolais?” said Edith.
Sophie ends up on a show with a television husband who is very concerned about how is perceived in real life, which brings one of the comedic scenes typical of Hornby’s writing.
“If I become a fictional father, I have a real commitment to my fictional children,” said Clive.
“Ah,” said Tony. “That might be where we’re going wrong. I don’t know who told you that, but it’s not true. An actor has no legal responsibilities to any dependents named in a television comedy script.”
Overall not my favorite Hornby book, but I enjoyed it. I’m a quarter of the way through my third read of the year, but really psyched about next week’s release of Pierce Brown’s “Morning Star.” It’s the third book in the Red Rising series that I would recommend to just about anyone who wants to have their socks rocked in a literary sense.