Suicide solution
Posted 29 Sep, 2005 at 16:57 by matt in /Books | Permanent link
I read Long Way Down -- Nick Hornby's latest, a jolly little tale of four people who meet while standing on a roof with the intent of jumping -- a few weeks ago, and had some trouble articulating my reactions. Now that it's been mulling for a while, let's see if I can do any better.
My general sense of Nick Horby is this: his essays (see Fever Pitch -- the book, not the movie -- or Songbook or The Polysyllabic Spree for examples) are sharp and witty and interesting; his novels share these characteristics, but tend to be on the painful side. Much of the pain comes from Hornby writing characters who are much, much less likeable than his own persona as an essayist, while still being within the bounds of realism. These are real sucky people he's talking about: self-absorbed obsessive geeks like Rob Fleming (High Fidelity), shallow gits like Will Lightman (About a Boy). I know several people who found all of the main characters in his last novel (How to be Good) sufficiently unpleasant in a variety of interesting ways that they've taken Hornby off their "must read new books instantly" lists, and that's saying something for many of the folks in question.
With this one... I didn't find it quite as painful as prior books, but I also didn't find it quite as compelling.
The book is written in fourfold first-person: each of our protagonists gets their fair share of perspective chapters. As is generally the case, none of them is particularly likeable, although they all have some endearing traits. Thematically, the book is (naturally enough) an exploration of suicide: what drives people to it, what keeps them from it. I found many of the ideas that he discusses (for instance, that suicidal feelings are the result of hope rather than despair) to be far more interesting than much of the narrative.
I think much of my problem with the book comes from it never really settling down into either being four stories or one. That is, you can't really read the individual stories on their own -- they're too intertwined for that -- but neither did I get a feeling of an overall narrative arc. There was a lot of general stumbling around, trying to keep these four disparate characters within the confines of the same story, and going from incident to incident without any particular momentum. (Of course, the usual disclaimer here: not being the Smartest Man Alive, it's possible that lots of stuff was going on and I missed it.)
I enjoyed reading it -- Hornby's got a wonderful touch with a jibe, and his characterizations are good (necessary in a book with this structure), and the ideas are very strong. But I'm not sure that I'll go back for a second reading. And that, at least, is a typical Hornby novel experience for me.