What exactly is the “particular kind of genius” shared by Prince Rogers Nelson and Charles Dickens? As the About a Boy author Nick Hornby acknowledges upfront in this idiosyncratic twin study, it’s hard to say on the face of it.
Prince was the priapic late-20th-century miniature god of sex-funk. Dickens was the undisputed emperor of the high Victorian novel. There are a few suggestive points of contact. They were both inveterate skirt chasers from poor backgrounds who got into money trouble despite success. And they were both extremely prolific — but not uniquely prolific, Hornby’s claims notwithstanding.
Dickens was capable of working on two novels at once. “No other writer has done this, as far as I know,” Hornby writes, although Terry Pratchett did it consistently through his career. Prince produced an unfathomable amount of music, but then so did Frank Zappa (although one may reasonably object here that Prince’s music is actually good).
“I had one coincidence to work with: they were both 58 years old when they died,” Hornby writes, self-deprecatingly. “And on closer inspection, Prince wasn’t even 58 when he died. He was 57. So I didn’t even have that.”
What they actually share is that both of them are, as Hornby puts it, “My People”: artists to whom he is singularly attached, who arrived in his life during his febrile, fertile formative years.
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On that basis I could be writing a book about Vladimir Nabokov and Britney Spears. Actually, on this basis, perhaps I should, because even if A Particular Kind of Genius isn’t totally compelling about its reasons for yoking these two artists together, it is a charming argument for enjoying both of them. And both Dickens and Prince are deeply, intensely enjoyable.
Hornby’s description of his astonished pleasure at reading Bleak House for the first time is one of the best blurbs that novel could have. “There was this incredible moment when the narrative starts to move, like a giant tanker,” he writes, which is exactly how reading Bleak House feels.
Similarly with Prince, Hornby was bewitched by his talent, and he passes that enchantment on to the reader. Where he really provides a service is in his sympathetic reading of Prince’s often-mocked mid-career “symbol” period when he changed his name to a squiggle and went to war with his record company.
By putting Prince’s fight to own his music together with Dickens’s American copyright woes (his novels were shamelessly pirated), Hornby finds something interesting and new in a passage of Prince’s life often derided as a celebrity tantrum. Hornby has a robust lack of squeamishness about the economics of creativity, and it makes him an excellent critic here.
“This book is about work, and nobody ever worked harder than these two, or at a higher standard, while connecting with so many people for so long,” Hornby concludes. It all amounts to a winningly grounded manifesto for artists: forget the preciousness so often urged as the route to brilliance, and embrace prodigiousness instead — and don’t forget to make sure you get paid.
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Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby
Viking £9.99 pp112
