the buddha of; suburbia; Arsenal freak, music geek, ex-husband and

NICK Hornby could only live closer to Highbury if he took up residence in Tony Adams' jockstrap. The 44-year-old writer, who came to fame in 1992 with Fever Pitch, the private memoirs and confessions of a justified gooner, has both his house and office in the streets surrounding Arsenal's North London stadium. "If I supported Tottenham, I wouldn't live anywhere near their ground," he chuckles with the satisfied air of a man who has had the good fortune to be obsessed with a team who play in leafy suburbia.

We meet in his office because he believes, quite rightly, that if he allowed journalists to interview him at home they would write about his personal things. The office, a small flat in a pleasant if unremarkable street, certainly offers few revelations about his inner psyche, but it would not be hard to guess who works in a place like this.

For a start, there are the framed posters for the films High Fidelity and Fever Pitch, adapted from his books. (Unlike many writers, Hornby has no anxiety about the cinema messing around with his work. A film of his 1998 novel About A Boy, starring Hugh Grant, is currently being made in London, and he is co-writing a script with the actress Emma Thompson). Then there are the shelves groaning with reference books - mostly biographies of rock stars, for Hornby is the kind of writer who may need to know the name of the drummer from Mud (Dave Mount, since you ask). There are a few CDs scattered around, although he doesn't really listen to music when he works, apart from "no word stuff" like Steve Reich or Philip Glass.

By the window, which is letting in the reddening glare of the hottest day of the year, there's the hulking computer on which Hornby wrote About A Boy and his new novel How To Be Good. Next to it, there's a framed photo of his seven-year-old son Danny; next to that, an ashtray in the shape of an upside-down football boot.

The author himself is slumped in an armchair and dressed for the terraces in black jeans and an unattractive orange T-shirt. It's hard to say what a literary superstar who transfers from Gollancz to Penguin for #2 million and who sells film rights to Robert De Niro for a similar sum should look like, but it's not Nick Hornby. Small and bald with ears like samosas, he's the kind of guy you might find at the back of a gig in some Camden dive, not at the forefront of British popular literature.

But he is. And as such he's just back from a big writing festival in New York, where he read with his friend Zadie Smith, the wnderkind author of White Teeth. Hornby likes America and America likes Hornby. He sells a lot of books there, thanks to the success of the film High Fidelity, starring John Cusack, which transplanted his tale of broken hearts and mint-condition vinyl from North London to Chicago. He's also the pop critic for The New Yorker magazine and a friend of several hot young American writers including Melissa Bank, author of The Girls' Guide To Hunting And Fishing.

Of course, to meet Hornby is to become his friend, or at least to feel like you are one for however long you spend in his company. Everyone, man and woman, who has ever written about him has said what a good bloke he is, making me wonder: "Is he? Can anyone really be that nice?" But the truth is he's lovely, samosa ears and all. At the end of our time together, when I still have loads of questions left, he even apologises for taking too long over his replies.

However, maybe because he's jetlagged, Hornby is a tad tetchy today. For instance, when I ask him whether he reads articles about himself (he doesn't and even stops the papers for a couple of weeks when he has a new book coming out) he has a bit of rant about a journalist who recently took him to task over where he lives. The interviewer couldn't understand why Hornby was still in North London when he could afford, say, a Derry Irvine-style residence with wallpaper at #350 a roll.

"You know, I've got a six-bedroom house in Highbury and no mortgage and that seems to be preposterously fortunate," he grumbles between chugs on a ubiquitous Silk Cut. "The idea that I have to defend that, that I should be flasher than that, seems absurd."

This goes to the heart of How To Be Good. Narrated by Katie Carr, a female GP whose failing marriage is further disrupted when her husband has a spiritual conversion and starts trying to save the planet by giving away their kids' toys and inviting the homeless to stay, the novel is concerned throughout with the dilemma of the title.

Does living a nice, middle-class life, all chilled Chardonnay and half read copies of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, make you a bad person just because there are people sleeping on the streets?

That sort of question has troubled Hornby for a while, particularly since the birth of his son, Danny, who is autistic. "You just enter a whole new moral atmosphere in lots of ways," he says. "Partly because everyone surrounding my son - carers, therapists, teachers at school - seems to me to exemplify pure good in a way that other parents don't experience."

Does he feel that he's a less virtuous person than the kinds of people he comes into contact with through Danny? "That's interesting. It's more connected with work, you know? I don't feel particularly unvirtuous, but on the other hand I don't do an awful lot either. They flog their guts out in a way that I don't. Or when I do, it's because it's my kid."

Hornby has felt this guilt before. As recounted in Fever Pitch, which has sold over 700,000 copies, he spent a few years working as a teacher, before quitting to concentrate on writing. It wasn't a decision he made lightly. "I didn't feel torn about what I wanted to do, but it kind of confused me about what kind of person I was, that the drive for self-expression and an easier life had won out so easily over the commitment to teach children."

Although he mutters that "it doesn't really feel like I'm being Mother Theresa", Hornby's response to the question of how to be good has been to put a lot of effort and money into TreeHouse, a London school for autistic children which his son attends. Inspired by Bono's efforts to reduce Third World debt, Hornby masterminded and edited last year's Speaking With The Angel, a terrific short story collection packed with fiction from the likes of Roddy Doyle, Irvine Welsh and, erm, Colin Firth. One pound from every copy sold goes to TreeHouse.

Hornby notes in the foreword, with as much anger as a mild- mannered chap can probably muster, that the provision of specialist school places is hopelessly inadequate for Britain's 76,000 autistic children. The proceeds from Speaking With The Angel, which has been a big international hit, have allowed TreeHouse to expand, but there is still a long way to go. "There have been enormous benefits to Danny from going to TreeHouse and it seems absurd that other kids can't benefit," Hornby says now.

Danny was born in 1993. It was a difficult birth - an emergency Caesarean, which Hornby and his now ex-wife Virginia Bovell suspect may be connected to the autism. At around 18 months, Danny lost most of the language he had acquired up until that point and became almost catatonic. He didn't like going out and was uncomfortable around anyone other than his parents. Now, says Hornby proudly, "he's way more sociable than he was, he's happy at school, his comprehension has improved incredibly. He doesn't speak. I don't know if he will speak, but he enjoys life most of the time and the school has an awful lot to do with that."

When Hornby first spoke publicly about his son's condition, he received loads of letters from people who claimed that they could cure him. "So there was a rather terrifying thought: What if one of these people really does have some kind of gift?" These days, the mail he gets from readers - and he gets a lot - can be divided into three categories: football, pop music and autism.

ABOUT halfway through How To Be Good, Katie Carr muses that "the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone."

Hornby has found this to be absolutely true. His life is such a rollercoaster, he might as well move to Alton Towers. "I've had a fairly extraordinary eight or nine years, in that professional success beyond anything I ever aimed for has happened at the same time as some quite hard things like, you know, I got divorced and had a disabled child." He gives a rueful laugh. "Not in that order."

These circumstances, he thinks, are the reason why every book he has written has been darker than the last. "I'm definitely bleaker," he nods, "but I think it's more than that. I think it's something to do with a tone I want to get where the sad stuff goes deeper and yet you still have comic set pieces. I can't read books that don't have soul and I can't read books that don't have jokes."

He gestures toward a brick-thick novel lying on the table between us. "Don't put the name because I know the guy, but this is going to be a big hyped book of next year and it's so grindingly negative that I'm about to give up on it. Even if How To Be Good is bleak, I think there's some sense that I personally had affection and feeling for the people I was writing about. All my books have some sort of warmth and hope in them. Most people live shitty enough lives without having to be reminded of it in every single line of something that they read."

I tell Hornby that one female colleague has said that what the novel does brilliantly is capture the ennui of a failing marriage. He's quite chuffed at this but says he's getting concerned at the number of women - battle-scarred from the sex wars - who tell him they identify with Katie Carr. Perhaps he can add divorcees to Arsenal freaks and music geeks as the core of his fanbase.

Because Hornby himself is divorced, it seems reasonable to ask how much of his own marital meltdown he put in the book. So I do.

"Actually almost none," he replies. And since any dishonest bones Hornby may have had were probably surgically removed at the same time as his ego, I'm inclined to believe him. "Without being personal about my marriage, I would say that 99 per cent of the problems were a mixture of Danny and work. And those are not experiences which resonate for a lot of people. I wouldn't say it described my own marriage, no."

He is still on good terms with his ex-wife. They see each other every day, a necessity born out of caring for Danny. In a 1999 interview with the Telegraph, Bovell seemed to hint that a reconciliation wasn't out of the question, but that now seems unlikely. Hornby is living with another woman and says he'd like to have more children.

He's already an uncle four times over. His sister Gill is married to the novelist Robert Harris, author of Fatherland and the man trotted out by the news to speak for the defence every time Peter Mandelson does something stupid. Hornby doesn't see Mandy independently of his brother-in-law but says he is very fond of him. I imagine that Harris's kids look forward to Uncle Nick coming round so they can talk about Hear'Say and the offside rule instead of the Hinduja brothers and what would have happened if the Nazis had won the war. "I think their little boy would rather talk about Peter Mandelson actually," Hornby laughs. "He's very much in his father's image."

There's gossip that Hornby and Harris are great rivals, always hoping to outdo each other in terms of sales. Not the case, he says. They both sell about the same (ie hundreds of thousands of copies) and, anyway, they are writing completely different sorts of books.

Hornby's friendship with Mandelson is unexpected but typical of the way he is trying to live his life. He is being driven mad by the all-pervasive cynicism of modern Britain. "If you took the moaning and bitching away, all conversation in metropolitan society would completely grind to a halt," he grimaces, hand clasped behind his head. "Nobody would know what to say. If you can't even be rude about Jeffrey Archer, who can you be rude about?

"I suppose my impatience with cynicism is partly an unexpected function of knowing more famous people and liking some of them. Journalists use names as a kind of shorthand and attach so much contempt to those names. But actually, if you know the person that's being used as the shorthand, you think 'God, poor ' Like Helen Fielding gets an awful lot and Peter Mandelson gets an awful lot. Dave Eggers is getting an awful lot in America."

Eggers is the young American author of A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, a tragi-comic memoir of raising his little brother after both parents died of cancer. It's been number one in the US bestseller list for the past 12 weeks and the backlash is building all the time.

Hornby and Eggers have been friends since just before AHWOSG - as it's known in the trade - came out in hardback last year. He has always preferred American writing to British and is rather jealous of the American literary scene, particular the offbeat antics of contributors to Eggers' literary magazine, McSweeney's.

"They are a bit frightening for older authors because they've decided that reading is kind of old hat so they've started blowing things up and smashing stuff," he says. On Thursday he went to an event in New York where one author read about a survivalist weekend he'd recently been on. At the end of the reading he took everybody out of the bookstore and showed them how to make fire out of twigs and sawdust. Hornby was impressed. "It made me feel that just standing up and reading a bit of my book in front of people wasn't going to hold them for much longer."

So when he comes up to Scotland to promote How To Be Good, can we expect a similarly radical approach? "I want a theme tune!" he beams. "All the best bands have theme tunes that they come on stage to."

And what would his theme tune be? He's not sure but I am: Here Comes The Nice. He may be Hollywood's darling, he may be a millionaire and he may get to hang out with the literati of both continents, but for Nick Hornby, thank goodness, virtue is its own reward How To Be Good is published by Penguin. Nick Hornby appears at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on June 19 at 7pm (contact 0141 222 7720) and at the West End branch of Waterstones, Edinburgh on June 20 at 1pm (contact 0131 556 3922)

Copyright 2001
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