Summer Book Review #2
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby.
Nick Hornby, for the unfamiliar, also wrote High Fidelity and About a Boy. I love High Fidelity. Reading it is how it must feel when guys watch an episode of Sex and the City. You get an entertaining and no doubt glossy peak into how the other sex thinks. Plus it was chock-full of pop culture references and biting sarcasm. The self-deprecating humor hid a warmer message.
And so I had high hopes for A Long Way Down. It's about four people who attempt suicide at the same place at the same time. They manage not to kill themselves and form a dysfunctional little family. The novel is about how to go on after you've hit rock bottom. Not to sound like a pretentious asshole, but it's kind of an existentialist novel, with the main theme seeming to be that even though life is pointless and absurd, all you can do is recognize that and keep going. (Sample line: "I felt like crying because I knew that making music was never going to make me successful, so Lizzie had just condemned me to another thirty-five years of poverty, rootlessness, despair, no health plan, cold-water motels, and bad hamburgers. It's just that I'd be eating the burgers, not flipping them.")
As perhaps you can see from that little sample, the novel just seems like it's trying too hard to be flippant and modern. Not a single character seems believable. Hornby valiantly tries to capture the voice of a prudish fifty-year-old-mother and fails. About the only character that is entertaining is Jess, a melodramatic teenager. I don't know if Hornby just lacks the range to write other types of characters or what, but they just seemed like stock characters. It was like the Breakfast Club but, you know, not as awesome.
I respect him for not giving it a super-cheesy happy ending. He didn't go overkill on giving his characters resolution, which worked with the story's theme. But it just lacked something. It felt like I was reading a synopsis of a novel and I never got drawn in enough.
Worth skipping.
Nick Hornby, for the unfamiliar, also wrote High Fidelity and About a Boy. I love High Fidelity. Reading it is how it must feel when guys watch an episode of Sex and the City. You get an entertaining and no doubt glossy peak into how the other sex thinks. Plus it was chock-full of pop culture references and biting sarcasm. The self-deprecating humor hid a warmer message.
And so I had high hopes for A Long Way Down. It's about four people who attempt suicide at the same place at the same time. They manage not to kill themselves and form a dysfunctional little family. The novel is about how to go on after you've hit rock bottom. Not to sound like a pretentious asshole, but it's kind of an existentialist novel, with the main theme seeming to be that even though life is pointless and absurd, all you can do is recognize that and keep going. (Sample line: "I felt like crying because I knew that making music was never going to make me successful, so Lizzie had just condemned me to another thirty-five years of poverty, rootlessness, despair, no health plan, cold-water motels, and bad hamburgers. It's just that I'd be eating the burgers, not flipping them.")
As perhaps you can see from that little sample, the novel just seems like it's trying too hard to be flippant and modern. Not a single character seems believable. Hornby valiantly tries to capture the voice of a prudish fifty-year-old-mother and fails. About the only character that is entertaining is Jess, a melodramatic teenager. I don't know if Hornby just lacks the range to write other types of characters or what, but they just seemed like stock characters. It was like the Breakfast Club but, you know, not as awesome.
I respect him for not giving it a super-cheesy happy ending. He didn't go overkill on giving his characters resolution, which worked with the story's theme. But it just lacked something. It felt like I was reading a synopsis of a novel and I never got drawn in enough.
Worth skipping.