Book Review: ‘Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius’ by Nick Hornby

You may be inspired by this if you’re any kind of artist — and even if you’re not one

Since I was most familiar with Nick Hornby as a novelist, when I first heard about this book, I wondered if it was a novel. Was it going to be a story about Prince or Charles Dickens traveling through time and meeting up with each other? Or was it maybe a fictionalized story of what it might be like if they encountered each other in the afterlife?

While neither of those ideas is bad (if I do say so myself), this book is not fiction. Rather, it’s Nick Hornby writing about how interestingly similar the professional and personal lives were of these two seemingly different artists from different countries and different centuries.

It’s quite interesting, for the most part. However, I’ll admit right here that I’m not any sort of expert or ‘superfan’ of either Prince or Charles Dickens — especially the latter. I’ve only read one of his books. However, like a lot of people, I’ve seen several movies and TV productions based on his stories.

As far as Prince goes, I’m probably like a lot of music fans. I knew and loved most of his big hit songs from the 1980s and 1990s, but I didn’t follow his career very closely in the last decade or so of his life.

Still, my lack of knowledge of a big part of those artists’ works never stopped me from being very impressed by each of them over the years and I now feel even more impressed by them after reading this book.

While Hornby spends some time going into the darker parts of Prince’s and Dickens’ personal and professional lives, which was certainly interesting, what I loved most in this book was learning about how each of the artists worked, particularly how each of them seemed to be driven by something almost magical that made each of them incredibly prolific during their short lives. They each worked incredibly hard and their results were amazing.

Overall, I enjoyed the book a lot. However, there were some times while reading this book that I was rubbed the wrong way by some of the things that Hornby wrote, especially when he shared how “bad” he thought some of the works of each of the artists were.

It’s one thing if someone doesn’t like, and even hates, a piece of art. That’s fine, of course. There’s nothing wrong with sharing that. However, not liking something doesn’t mean that it’s “bad.” It just means it’s not for you. I like Hornby a lot as a writer, but a few things like that in the book where he seemed a little too harsh got under my skin a little bit.

Thankfully, though, that was pretty minimal. I loved learning more about Prince and Dickens in this book. Not only that, but I’m now very curious to delve into works from each of them that I’m currently unfamiliar with.

Most importantly, at least to me, is that I walked away from this book feeling inspired. I think that any artists who read this, whether they’re old or new at what they do, will probably feel the same way.

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