Nick Hornby’s novel, ‘Funny Girl,’ sedate despite swinging ’60s setting

Riverhead, 452 pages, $27.95

Set, for the most part, during the 1960s, “Funny Girl” is a departure for Nick Hornby — the story of a young woman named Sophie Straw (nee Barbara Parker), who after being named 1964’s Miss Blackpool, decamps from the north of England for Swinging London, where she becomes a TV comedian.

Sophie is obsessed with Lucille Ball and wants to bring her sort of energy to British television, but initially that’s a hard sell.

Hornby has written about other female protagonists: Annie in “Juliet, Naked,” Katie Carr in “How to Be Good.” There’s something more expansive, though, in “Funny Girl,” which is as sedate a work as he has produced. What I mean is that this is a book that takes the long view, that seeks to give us a broad sense of its characters’ circumstances. In that regard, its 1960s setting serves a double purpose — first, to engage us in the energy of the era’s burgeoning youth culture, and second, to remind us of the speed with which time eclipses all.

The members the production team that discover Sophie are the novel’s other central players — Clive, the leading man who becomes Sophie’s faithless fiance; Dennis, the producer-director who loves her from a distance; the writers, Bill and Tony — one gay, the other married but (perhaps) closeted. It adds up to the portrait of a culture in transition, in which “(w)hat was once both pertinent and laudably impertinent became familiar and sometimes even a little polite.”

“Funny Girl” is at its best in its evocation of these shifting sands of normalcy, the ever-expanding notion of what propriety will bear.

And yet, in the end, this cannot compensate for a flatness in the novel, a lack of full dimensionality. It’s not that “Funny Girl” is unenjoyable; like much of Hornby’s writing, it is funny and fast moving, perceptive and sharp. There is, however, no edge of consequence, no real sense of stakes.

The conflicts here get resolved without a lot of tension, as if happiness, or at least reconciliation, were the inevitable outcome all along.

That’s a lovely fantasy, and it mirrors what we want for these characters as well. At the same time, it is not enough. What Hornby is getting at is the fine line between ambition and dissatisfaction, the way the things we want can’t help but lead to compromise.