Hornby goes for sitcom laughs in 'Funny Girl'
When 21-year-old British blonde Barbara Parker gets elected Miss Blackpool 1964, she jilts the small-town pageant, dumps the crown, and beelines it to London to pursue a showbiz career. An aspiring comic actress, she grew up studying I Love Lucy reruns and wants only to make people laugh just like Lucy did.
Poor naive darling, you say? Her theatrical agent, who is unnerved by his new client's bombshell beauty, gives her the stage name Sophie Straw (thinking "a roll in the hay") and tries to find her the London equivalent of the soda counter at Schwab's. The Blackpool ingénue, who has her own ideas, goes to a sitcom audition.
Plying her good looks, guileless manner and quick wit, Sophie quickly charms the BBC director and two sitcom writers. Her enthusiasm breathes new vitality into their moribund script and sets their creative juices pumping. They rewrite the show around her, making it about a mismatched romance between a fictional working-class girl, coincidentally named Barbara who's from Blackpool, and Jim, an Oxford grad employed at 10 Downing Street.
The revised show centers so much on Sophie that the writers rename it from the original Wedded Bliss (now they're neither wedded nor exactly blissful), to Barbara and Jim, and then, more accurately and humorously, to Barbara (and Jim).
The new series attracts 17 million viewers and is the most popular sitcom in BBC history. Sophie's an overnight star. Through three seasons, everything goes swimmingly. Then, real life begins to erode sitcom reality. And the writers' and actors' personal lives and problems that inspired the show's freshness begin to make it stale.
While the novel's title echoes the 1968 Barbra Streisand film about Fanny Brice, and Sophie's idol, Lucille Ball, makes a small cameo, neither matters. Of importance is the story's setting in dynamic 1960s London, where a cultural revolution is underway, where the Beatles are changing the world's pop scene, the sexual revolution is heating up…and TV sitcoms are testing limits of funny and subversive.
The best-selling author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, Nick Hornby here again masterfully creates a cast of endearing characters, not unlike a TV sitcom ensemble in which each's role continuously expands episode by episode.
Hornby's narrator seldom takes his eye off Sophie (neither will readers), but his supporting cast members are all amusing and each in his own way memorable.
Philandering and vainglorious Clive Richardson plays the parenthetical Jim to a fault. Talented writer Bill Gardiner is gay and wants to be gayer, and his close friend and collaborator Tony Holmes has a fairly conventional marriage and a baby and doesn't want to be gay.
The erudite, bearded, pipe-smoking director-producer Dennis Maxwell-Bishop is a kind and caring square who secretly pines for Sophie. There are other well-drawn characters who accelerate the plot or lend insight.
But smart dialogue drives this novel, right through to the heartwarming ending that unexpectedly adds emotional gravity when Barbara (and Jim) is but a smile-inducing memory for an aging generation, like I Love Lucy is today.
Hornby's fluency in script-like breeziness and crisp banter makes Funny Girl a pleasurable read. So does page after page of perfectly timed and delivered humor, the subtle and understated kind, that starts with the first line: "She didn't want to be a beauty queen, but as luck would have it, she was about to become one."
Funny Girl
By Nick Hornby
Riverhead, 452 pp.
3 stars out of four