Nick Hornby's Funny Girl a Middling Effort

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FUNNY GIRL (2015/UK/USA)

By Nick Hornby

Riverhead, 453 pages

★★ ½

No, this not a spinoff of an old Streisand movie, though it is about a Barbara. Barbara Parker is a beautiful young woman who'd much rather be known for being silly than for being statuesque. The story opens in 1964, when Parker wins the Miss Blackpool beauty pageant and promptly forfeits her crown when she realizes that her duties would keep her in that seaside domain for another year. Hey—if you've ever been to Blackpool, you'd understand! Instead, Parker trudges off to London in the hope of following in the footsteps of her idol: Lucille Ball.

After a series of misadventures, the undereducated, but plucky and blunt Parker lands a role in a TV rom-com titled Wedded Bliss? (The question mark factors into the plot.) Against all odds, it turns into a massive hit. Hornby takes us through the decades to the present when Parker—known by her stage name Sophie Straw—is an aged icon whose co-stars have been largely forgotten.

Parker/Straw is the central character, but the more intriguing duo is the show's writers: Bill Gardiner and Tony Holmes. After World War II they were caught in flagrante delicto in a men's lavatory, but recovered to begin writing frothy TV fare in the late 1950s. Wedded Bliss? transforms them as well, but will success file the barbs from their rapier wit? We watch Bill embrace his sexuality while Tony follows a more conventional bourgeois path. Will this take down their partnership when their hit show declines and ends—as all TV shows inevitably do?

I liked how Hornby presented the early 1960s British entertainment scene, a time in which vaudeville and music halls were not quite dead and BBC TV was stolid, serious, and dull. As the expression goes, then the Sixties happened. Shows like Wedded Bliss?—seen by their detractors as gutter trash and their defenders as groundbreaking—soon seemed like pastoral innocence compared to what loomed on the  horizon. Till Death Do Us Part—whose American copycat was All in the Family—obliterated the decorum bar and writers took full advantage to offer fare such as: The Benny Hill Show, Not Only… But Also, and Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Maybe that's my problem with this novel. Barbara/Sophie has her moments and I enjoyed her working-class frankness, but funny she isn't. She's mostly an accidental celebrity and about as interesting as most such figures aren't. Put more directly, she's no Lucille Ball. The book is overlong and the post-mid-60s parts are labored and unconvincing. I found Funny Girl a diversion for the seven-hour flight during which I read it, but it's truly a middling effort from Hornby. It's fine as flight fodder, but if you're on the ground, you should find your way to the library for better Horny offerings such as High Fidelity, About a Boy, or A Long Way Down.  

 Rob Weir