A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby

In a competition judged by a competent jury for the most salient influence on male British writers between the years 1984 and 2005, Nick Hornby would certainly win a prize. It might not be the first prize - even at this late stage that garland could probably be claimed by Martin Amis. But were there to be a "contribution to publishers' turnover" category, the author of Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and How To Be Good would knock all rivals into a cocked hat. What might be called the "Hornbyfication" of books written by reasonably intelligent Englishmen beneath the age of 50 can be glimpsed in every bookshop in the country. Without his authenticating trail, a whole compartment of the modern publishing industry would simply cease to exist.

How did this happen? George Orwell complained, 70 years ago, that most English novels were written by literary gents, for literary gents, about literary gents. It was not merely that Hornby, like Kingsley Amis 40 years before, brought into being a kind of character who had not previously been admitted into the genteel sanctums of polite literature: that downbeat, loosely well-intentioned thirtysomething with his consuming passion for the lumpen male pursuits of drink, pop and soccer, romantically feckless but capable of being dragged to heel. His greatest contribution, it turns out, has been in the field of idiom.

Whereas Martin Amis took the patterns of "ordinary" speech and souped them up into a brand of high-octane fake-Americana, Hornby quietened them down into the sedulous, self-interrogative streams of an occasionally less than illuminating consciousness. "Everyone reacts to something like in different ways, don't they?" a character in A Long Way Down muses at one point. This, you feel, is an archetypal Hornby sentence: meditative, enquiring, collusive, anxious above all to get the reader on his (or, in this case, her) side. Few modern British novelists have quite so conspicuously set out to perform the underrated trick of writing for their audience rather than themselves.

It scarcely needs saying, of course, that the Hornby influence, like the Amis influence, has been entirely malign. Not only did it foster a shelf-full of unbelievably dreary male commito-phobes, whose destiny on the further side of Miss Right's Ikea table-top could be glimpsed in the opening chapter, but it also, from the moment that Fever Pitch made it OK to write about blokeish pursuits, contrived to muddy the waters of non-fiction as well.

Already, four months into the publishing year, I must have seen half a dozen male fortysomething confessionals on subjects as diverse as comedy, clothing and relationships, in which the Hornby thumbprint of dogged, self-deprecating chirpiness - not the way in which Hornby writes, but the way his imitators think that he writes - can be glimpsed on every collar.

Hornby's books have always stood or fallen on the resonance of their voice. That his new novel, while still thrumming with all the usual ventriloquial qualities, also falters a bit in the voice department is, on balance, a good sign. It shows his determination to write himself out of the corner in which the oeuvre might have been danger of confining him.

In fact, A Long Way Down harbours four voices: Martin, a scandal-ridden TV presenter lately arraigned for sleeping with an underage girl; Maureen, a middle-aged single mother with a severely disabled son named Matty; Jess, the cloaca-tongued 18-year-old drop-out daughter of a government minister; and "JJ", a pizza-delivering American rock'n'roll casualty.

Each turns up on New Year's Eve at "Toppers' House" in North London with the aim of throwing him- or herself off its vertiginous parapet. Each, talked down by the others, is a subsumed into a mutual support group keen to stymie these self-destructive urges for the next six weeks.

The most obvious thing about this (as ever) immensely likeable if conceit-driven tour around four troubled psyches is its own Hornbyfication. First there is the spectacle of the man himself slyly touting his cultural preferences through the text: having JJ, for example, recommending Richard Yates's novel Revolutionary Road and clogging his iPod with tracks by Jonathan Richman and The Cure, or getting Maureen to turn her son's room into a shrine to Patrick Viera. The second most obvious thing, though - deeply bound up with the first - is the series of faint slippages and fractures discernible in the voice.

To make rough-and-ready distinctions, Martin is modern urban bloke, Maureen unworldly Catholic woman, Jess teenage vixen and JJ knowing literary-minded Yank. Separated as they are, various stylistic mannerisms are common to all, in particular Hornby's long-patented "Well, not..." formula.

Here, for instance, Martin wonders what he has done with his life: "And what I'd done is, I'd literally pissed my life away. Well, OK, not literally literally." A page or so later, Jess picks up the scent: "But 10 minutes I spent talking to Bong made history. Well, not like 55BC or 1939, not historical history." Not to be outdone, Martin obligingly lobs the ball back: "That's what everything comes down to: ladders. Well, not ladders literally..."

Or there is that classic Hornby manoeuvre, the extended, back-to-comparative-basics analogy, as when Jess tries to assess the part played in her problems by vanished sister Jennifer. "Say I'm a Spaghetti Bolognese. Well, I reckon Jen is the tomatoes. Maybe the onions. Or even the garlic. But she's not the meat or the pasta."

This, it might be argued, is the moment - about halfway through - when Hornby comes closest to writing like Nick Hornby, sounding more like one of his epigoni than himself. Significantly, as the novel gathers pace and Hornby's rueful-comic seriousness starts to move forward, the mild air of shakiness recedes.

In the end, A Long Way Down looks to be one of those transitional novels in which the interest lies in the spectacle of the novelist trying to break new ground. The dozens of sub-Hornbys busily at large in this crowded market-place would be ill-advised to follow. He remains at once the most imitated and the least imitable of writers.

DJ Taylor's 'Orwell: the Life' is published by Vintage

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