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| M
Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 5472 Registered: 11-1998 |
Dear Membership – This week my pick is probably someone you already know, but I thought perhaps you had not heard about his newest novel. I’m recommending A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. I’m a Hornby fan from way back – if you follow movies at all, you’ve probably seen or heard about his two other books brought to the big screen, High Fidelity and About a Boy. Nick is not only a humorist, but a writer who has garnered honors – a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E. M. Forster Award and the Orange Word International Writers’ London Award. But beyond that high-falutin’ awards stuff, Nick is laugh-out-loud funny. Every one of his books has been worth the cover price and then some. Not only have I read all his novels, but I had the pleasure of meeting him this summer at a book signing sponsored by Powell’s Books here in Portland. Nick is charming, affable, and a sharp wit. And you gotta love someone who signs your dog-eared copy of High Fidelity with “Love, Nick.” Another remote and standoffish writer? Not a bit, not Nick. He makes you feel as if you’ve known him for years. So, if you’re tired of slogging through War and Peace because you feel you should be reading “serious literature,” give yourself a breather and give Nick’s novels a try. Though his newest is about a serious subject – suicide – Nick handles the topic with his now infamous brand of humor and insight. You’ll find yourself laughing in spite of yourself. A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby is available in the WPF BookShop under “Admin’s Featured Five-Star Book Picks.” Love, M (Administrator) __________________________________________________________________ A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby __________________________________________________________________ Editorial Review From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. If Camus had written a grown-up version of The Breakfast Club, the result might have had more than a little in common with Hornby's grimly comic, oddly moving fourth novel. The story opens in London on New Year's Eve, when four desperate people—Martin, a publicly disgraced TV personality; Maureen, a middle-aged woman with no life beyond caring for her severely disabled adult son; Jess, the unstable, punked-out daughter of a junior government minister; and JJ, an American rocker whose music career has just ended with a whimper—meet on the roof of a building known as Toppers' House, where they have all come to commit suicide. Bonded by their shared misery, the unlikely quartet spends the night together, telling their stories, getting on each others' nerves even as they save each others' lives. They part the following morning, aware of having formed a peculiar sort of gang. As Jess reflects: "When you're sad—like, really sad, Toppers' House sad—you only want to be with other people who are sad."It's a bold setup, perilously high-concept, but Hornby pulls it off with understated ease. What follows is predictable in the broadest sense—as the motley crew of misfits coalesces into a kind of surrogate family, each individual takes a halting first step toward creating a tolerable future—but rarely in its particulars. Allowing the four main characters to narrate in round-robin fashion, Hornby alternates deftly executed comic episodes—an absurd brush with tabloid fame, an ill-conceived group vacation in the Canary Islands, a book group focused on writers who have committed suicide, a disastrous attempt to save Martin's marriage—with interludes of quiet reflection, some of which are startlingly insightful. Here, for example, is JJ, talking about the burden of understanding that he no longer wants to kill himself: "In a way, it makes things worse, not better.... Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it's not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good."While the reader comes to know all four characters well by the end of the novel, it's Maureen who stands out. A prim, old-fashioned Catholic woman who objects to foul language, Maureen is, on the surface, the least Hornbyesque of characters. Unacquainted with pop culture, she has done nothing throughout her entire adult life except care for a child who doesn't even know she's there and attend mass. As she says, "You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you." Hornby takes a Dickensian risk in creating a character as saintly and pathetic as Maureen, but it pays off. In her own quiet way, she's an unforgettable figure, the moral and emotional center of the novel. This is a brave and absorbing book. It's a thrill to watch a writer as talented as Hornby take on the grimmest of subjects without flinching, and somehow make it funny and surprising at the same time. And if the characters occasionally seem a little more eloquent or self-aware than they have a right to be, or if the novel turns just the tiniest bit sentimental at the end, all you can really fault Hornby for is an act of excessive generosity, an authorial embrace bestowed upon some characters who are sorely in need of a hug. (June)Tom Perrotta's most recent novel, Little Children, has just been published in paperback by St. Martin's Griffin. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. A Conversation with Nick Hornby from Nick's website: www.nickhornby.net Why a book about suicide? What provoked your interest in the subject, and in this particular treatment of it? I’m not sure that this is a book about suicide – in fact, I know it’s not. I don’t want to give too much away, but a book about suicide would have some suicides in it, and…Well, this one does, and it doesn’t. My interest in the book’s initial set-up came because I wanted a chance to look at people who have hit rock bottom, at least in terms of morale. And then I wanted to find a way of leading them – literally – back from the edge, without being either sentimental or simplistic about it. You became known for writing books from a young man’s point of view, then you wrote about a marriage from a woman’s point of view, and now you’re writing from the point of view of four very different people. Why? Was this a conscious evolution or does it just reflect your changing interests and preoccupations? There hasn’t yet been a conscious evolution – everything has felt like the next stop on the same train journey, even if it doesn’t necessarily look that way immediately. But I think writers do get frustrated with the amount they are able to bite off, especially early on in their careers. You want to write about the whole of life, but of course that’s beyond all of us, so you choose this little patch that you think you can handle in a novel. And then you get more confident, and more ambitious….Even so, I still feel that I’m at the beginning of a career, in terms of what I know. What I’m looking for, all the time, is a narrative idea that will accommodate many different tones, including comedy. I’m pleased with A Long Way Down in that sense. You’re a very well-known figure in Britain – something of a celebrity, in fact, who gets approached on the street and asked for autographs. One of your characters is a television morning show host who also gets acknowledged on the street, although not in a very complimentary way. Is Martin the absolute nightmare vision of contemporary celebrity? Writers are never celebrities, not really. I’d bet that even JK Rowling, surely the most famous writer in the world now, and certainly the most successful, can shop in her local supermarket without being recognized too often. Every now and again someone stops me, but very rarely – they’ve only got a dust-jacket photo and a couple of TV interviews to go on. Certainly my life hasn’t been made unbearable! But Martin’s different. Like a lot of contemporary celebrities, he has no discernible talent beyond what must have been a tenacious desire to remain in the media glare. And when you’re out of that glare, life comes unraveled pretty fast, I suspect. Those people are a human version of plants – they need the spotlight to live. JJ, the young American who wants to be a rock star and falls short, recalls the guys from High Fidelity and About a Boy who helped make you famous. He’s deeply affected by pop music, and by books, and very knowledgeable about them, as you are. What’s his role in the novel? Is he a kind of incarnation of your former self, a visit to your lost youth? It’s the not making it that interested me, more than the music and the books, even – it was so easy to imagine myself washed up at 35 (especially as I was exactly that age when my first book was published). I was certainly frightened, when I was 30 or 31 and failing to become a writer, that there was no way back to a conventional career, and I was going to spend my life poor and frustrated and unhappy. I had a college degree, though. JJ’s bright, and talented, but formally uneducated and unqualified – that gap between what you’re capable of and what you’re actually allowed to do is terrifying. Jess, the youngest character, is also the most outrageous, the least articulate, and perhaps the most enigmatic. Who is she to you? I’m not sure, but I keep being drawn to these young, tough, wild girls – there was one in About A Boy, too. I like her ungovernability and her lack of socialization – or rather, I’m interested in it. And of course people with that kind of energy are fantastic to write about. The energy rubs off. All of the characters ultimately decide to go on living, at least for another six months, but they make it clear that this is not some neat, inspirational story of self-help and redemption. They all have a long way to go. But what is it that lets them go on? Is it seeing themselves clearly, and having others accept them as they are? I’m not sure that they see themselves clearly. Without going into details, they all find something to cling to – even if, in some cases, the thing that’s keeping them afloat is not something that we would choose for ourselves. The point is that it floats, not that it’s pretty, or useful, or that it makes any sense. You don’t ask a plank of wood to make sense if you need to cling to it. The hope is, I suppose, that it might allow them to drift into shallower, calmer waters. Maureen talks about the stories we tell to keep ourselves going. Would that be the function of fiction? For me, it should be the function of everything - music, books, films, the works. I am mystified by the way we have allowed serious culture to be hijacked by people who effectively tell us, over and over again, that we should kill ourselves. My theory is that to over-compensate for the comparatively glamorous, fulfilled, and pleasant lives they lead, creative people feel they have to tell us that life is nasty, brutish and short; I feel that too many of the world’s population know that already. The art that means the most to me is the art that is redemptive. All four of your characters have spiritual yearnings, but Maureen is explicitly religious – Catholic, in fact. She even quotes at one point from the Psalms of Jewish and Christian Scripture. How vital a force is religion in contemporary culture? It depends how you define culture… Most contemporary Western writers, for example, are a pretty godless lot, myself included, so religion plays less of a part in contemporary fiction than perhaps it should, when you think about what kind of a role it plays in contemporary life. After all, we’re living in fear at the moment because of the current war between born-again Christians and Muslim extremists. My generation’s attitude could probably best be summarized as ‘A Plague on both your houses,’ and it’s probably not good enough. You’re a British writer who visits America often and knows this country fairly well. How have you seen this country change in recent years? Is there a growing rift between America and the rest of the world? Well, there is -- there’s certainly a lot of ill-feeling in Europe towards the US government and the people who voted for it -- but you’d never know it if you’re a writer. You do readings, and meet nice, concerned, liberal people who feel embarrassed – in fact, I’ve never felt closer to Americans than I have these last couple of years. Maybe the East Coast of the US will snap off and float across the Atlantic, and the West Coast will drift off towards Australia…That just leaves the problem of Chicago. How do you see your fiction evolving from this point? Are you working on another novel? The rhythm of the last few years means that I’ve tended not to start another book before the paperback of the current book is out -- there’s too much to do in the first year of a book’s life, too much travel and talking. So I haven’t started anything yet. As for evolution…. I just want to get better at what I do. So I’ll try and find a story and some characters that will suit this ambition. | ||
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Advanced Member Username: kerryann Post Number: 55 Registered: 10-2002 |
Hey M, I haven't read the book yet, but I read a review of it in People magazine some weeks ago (if not months) and I bought it that same day. It sounded like a really good read. I intend on reading it sometime in the near future as soon as I can wade through the thousands of other "I meant to read it!" books piled on top of each other in my entirely too small bedroom. Thanks for the (well-deserved) recommendation. |
