Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books, 2022).
What do a 19th-century Victorian novelist and a 20th-century rock star have in common? More than you might expect, according to award-winning author Nick Hornby, who's devoted an entire book to the unlikely pair.
The impetus for the book came from the 2020 release of a commemorative boxed set of Prince's 1987 album Sign o' the Times. This release -- which included a whopping 63 songs that hadn't originally made the cut -- got Hornby thinking: "Who else ever produced this much? Who else ever worked that way? It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but then I realized there was an answer: Dickens. Dickens did. Dickens worked that way."
Once Hornby recognized that the two artists had this enormous creative energy in common, he couldn't stop thinking about the connection and trying to discover more links between them. One of those links, he acknowledges, is simply that both of them were among what he calls "My People" -- great creatives, from Duke Ellington to Preston Sturges to Aretha Franklin to Robert Altman, who have influenced and inspired him over the years. But there's more to it than that.
Both Dickens and Prince, Hornby observes, were born with a genius that manifested itself early and drove them relentlessly throughout their lives -- arguably driving them both to early graves. (Dickens died at 58 and Prince at 57, and by that time, as Hornby remarks, "Those extraordinary creative brains must have been a thousand years old.") Both of them were passionate about the arts -- music for Prince, books and theater for Dickens -- and learned their craft from ravenous consumption and painstaking analysis of other artists' work.
Neither Dickens nor Prince was a perfectionist -- both of them worked too hard and too fast for that. You could even say they were both too talented for that. "Prince and Dickens were lucky in that they didn't need to be any better than they were," Hornby explains. "If you're capable of knocking out Purple Rain and Oliver Twist, what would be the point of delaying the process by a couple of years to make them slightly better, or focusing on one project at a time? That way we'd have lost something further down the line -- a novel, an album, a few side projects. There would have been less, and in this case, less is not more. We'd have lost out." In cases like theirs, the perfect really would have been the enemy of the good. They were wired to keep making art and connecting with their audiences, and they just kept doing that, day after day after day, to their satisfaction and our benefit. They were "artists with no off switch."
Now, I should pause here and clarify something: I know next to nothing about Prince, personally. I have the musical tastes of an 85 year old, so something like Dickens and Sinatra would have been more in my wheelhouse. So this book was a bit of an odd experience for me, as a reader very familiar with one subject and not at all familiar with the other. I was forced to rely entirely on Hornby's knowledge of Prince, but he's very knowledgeable indeed, and communicates his knowledge effectively, so I was able to follow along without difficulty.
And though I can't ever see myself becoming much of a Prince fan -- "as the decades went on, loving Prince meant having to ignore some loweringly lewd lyrics," admits Hornby -- I still was able to appreciate the author's great enthusiasm for both of his subjects, and his incisive and often witty analysis of their work. (One standout: "Dick Swiveller, with his languid, comical phrasemaking ... is so clearly an influence on Wodehouse that Bertie Wooster would have been entitled to a DNA test.") It can be a genuine treat to hear others, especially those as articulate as Nick Hornby, talk about their own particular group of "My People" -- especially, for me, when one of those people is Charles Dickens.
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