THERE is a heartbreaking sequence in White City Blue, winner of the Whitbread Award in the First Novel category, where the protagonist, Frankie the Fib, remembers a seaside holiday he spent as a kid. Tim Lott now can't remember if it happened as he has written it, but thinks it must have done - pretty much.
"I was on holiday in Cornwall two years ago - I was with my kids - and it occurred to me that they were seeing exactly what I saw, and it never leaves me, that romance of going into that green water. And those rock pools which actually never produce anything exciting but you always kind of hope for something fascinating and wonderful. There is something heartbreaking about it too. Because it's your lost childhood."
White City Blue is about friendship, specifically male friendship, and in spite of its backdrop of football, booze and sexual boasting, Lott's view is surprisingly tender, perhaps because the all-for-one and one-forall friendships forged in his west-London childhood still retain their romance even though, like the rock pools, they were doomed to disappoint.
The book inevitably has drawn comparisons both to Nick Hornby and Martin Amis but, as has been recognised by the judges, Tim Lott is no Hornby/Amis carpetbagger. Although White City Blue is his first work of fiction, he was already a recognised writing talent in 1996 when The Scent of Dried Roses, a memoir revolving around the suicide of his mother, won the J.R. Ackerley Award for autobiography.
Lott had been playing with the idea of a novel exploring male friendship for some time, but his agent steered him away. Instead, he spent six months working on a Mailer/Capote-style charting of the 1997 election, eventually abandoned when Tony Blair decided not to play ball. Although extremely angry at the time, Lott says he is now immensely grateful because by then Hi Fidelity had shown there was a market for The Friends of Frankie the Fib, as the novel was originally called, and the title he still prefers.
"I think Nick Hornby is a much more important writer than he is given credit for. He's unfairly marginalised as a lad lit bloke. I'm full of admiration for him. He was the first to write about men in a sympathetic way, in a way that his heroine Anne Tyler might write about women. In other words he took over that domestic territory and made it his own. He wrote with great sympathy for ordinary people. He didn't write with contempt or disdain like Martin Amis, who satirises ordinary people and spends too much time sneering at them."
However, the shadow of Amis did more than simply antagonise. Lott originally wanted to set his story in Notting Hill, where he now lives. But because it was so clearly marked out as Martin Amis territory, he felt obliged to move a mile west, to White City and Shepherd's Bush, an urban no man's land - albeit rapidly gentrifying - which remains, he says, "a scumhole, full of yobs and drunks".
Lott's dislike of Amis is palpable. Although quick to acknowledge his talent as "a terrific writer" he adds - half under his breath - "although all his books, I think, could use a good editor". His literary heroes are cast from a different mould: playwrights Peter Flannery and Alan Bennett, "people who write about ordinary people without sneering at them. I get very upset at the easy middle-class literary response to ordinary people that they are contemptible and ridiculous in some way. And that's not my experience. They have their own inner lives, they have their own difficulties, their own richness. "I never think of people as being good or bad, I think of them as having certain levels of sadness really. And I think people's sadness is expressed in difficult ways, sometimes in hostility, sometimes in depression. I don't see people as being wicked; I just seem them as living tragic lives and they try and make their mark somehow and maybe that's by violence and maybe that's by cruelty."
Lott is incensed at the "false distinction" that separates literary fiction from popular fiction in England. His own ambition is to bridge that gap, to write "intelligent, thoughtful and thought-provoking books which also keep you turning the page, the sort of thing the Americans do without thinking about it, like Philip Roth and John Updike and E.L. Doctorow and Pete Dexter and Joan Didion. They are fine writers but don't make it into an impenetrable read. They are much more demotic. They write about ordinary people, they don't write about intellectuals in Hampstead. There's no distinction between brilliant writing or appealing to you or me."
At the root of this crippling divide, Lott believes, is the English class system, and over the course of our lunch the conversation regularly returns to the same topic. He admits that he is "very hung up on class, obsessively so", though there is barely a hint of it in White City Blue, which exists hermetically sealed within the world he grew up in.
From the age of eight, Tim Lott read anything he could lay his hands on: Dostoevsky, Orwell, Baldwin. At the local library, not at school, because being clever didn't make you liked. "I think I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but thought it was impossible because writers came from a class, they were gods really. You didn't have a chance of joining them, but you had a chance of being a journalist, I suppose. My own horizons were utterly truncated by a social background in which one's expectations were so limited. When I told the careers master at school that I wanted a job at the local paper, he just laughed, thought it was ridiculous. Even that was for someone with a degree. I said: `I don't care what you think, that's what I'm going to do.' Because I am a very determined person and have a huge amount of drive, or used to."
As the blurb on the book tells you, Tim Lott got what he wanted - and went to university. He read politics and history at the London School of Economics, worked as a journalist, broadcaster, magazine editor and television producer. He has achieved the "bigger, wider, shinier" world that his alter ego, Frankie the Fib wanted. Winning the Whitbread, says Lott, was only matched by winning his class essay competition at the age of eight, subject: James Bond.
Tim Lott's background is solidly white working-class. He was brought up in heavily immigrant Southall. His mother was born in Shepherd's Bush, his father spent his working life - 38 years - working in a greengrocer's in Notting Hill. He says he knew that White City Blue was going to be a success when his father read it and loved it. "When I said, `why do you like it, Dad?' he said, because he liked the characters, he believed in them and he cared about them. The first novel I wrote, and which never got published, he didn't like. So he's my old grey whistle test.
"He's very much a template for me of an Englishman that's not written about. And it's one of the things that drives my writing in some ways. I look at my father, he's a decent man, a decent intelligent man who's worked hard all his life, who's got enormous personal dignity and integrity. And I know many men of his generation. "And yet when I read about people like him in books, there's no sense of this. Yes, he wears bad clothes and Pringle sweaters; doubtless to the average Hampstead intellectual he would appear absurd, because he's not a miner, or working in a factory, traditionally the kind of working-class people that are lionised by the intellectuals. But he is England, my dad is England.
"And I do think the English are a remarkable culture and one that I kind of admire and am proud of, and I say this from a left-liberal point of view, very different to the tub-thumping Telegraph reader where it shades into fascism. I'm proud of its multiculturalism, I'm proud of its tolerance, I'm proud of its ability to integrate and I'm also proud of the southern English who are never mentioned by intellectuals who are writing about those northern working-class towns."
The comfortable world of Tony, Colin, Nodge and Frankie the Fib finally falls apart when the layers of dishonesty, built up over the years, are stripped away. "For Frankie and his friends these layers of dishonesty build up through fear, they are too terrified really - although they would never admit it in a million years - to move on. And the moment when the veils of denial are lifted, that's the moment the writer always looks for: the moment all those lies we tell each other finally fall away to reveal your essence, the testing moment when you discover who you really are and who the people you love are, and you can't turn away."
White City Blue is published by Viking. The Whitbread Book Of The Year Awards will be announced tonight and will be broadcast on BBC2 at 9.30 p.m.
