A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby
c. 2005
Riverhead Books: New York
333 pages
by Nick Hornby
c. 2005
Riverhead Books: New York
333 pages
So I liked Nick Hornby's other books, especially High Fidelity, so when I saw this one on the "New in Paperback" table at Barnes and Noble, I decided to pick it up as a good bit of summer reading. In the end, it's not as good as High Fidelity, but this was an entertaining read.
A Long Way Down is about four people: Martin, JJ, Jess and Maureen. The story is told in sections with the narration switching between all four perspectives. They meet on the top of a building on New Years Eve. All of them have come there to jump, but none of them do. The book follows them for the next three months or so, documenting how their lives and relationships change after they choose to keep on living.
But it's not a warm fuzzy book, and these are truly flawed characters. In particular, Jess is NUTS, and highly annoying. She's abrasive, she attacks people verbally, with clear intent to harm. You hate her, and at the same time, you feel for her, and feel bad for her, because sometimes, life sucks. (As an aside, in the sections that are written from her perspective, there are no quotation marks, or as she calls them "speech marks" because she supposedly doesn't know how to use them. While not knowing how to use quotation marks was a cute little character point, and I can see where it helped the author to distinguish her style from the other characters, something that must have been part of the challenge of writing the novel from four different perspectives, it only made any dialogue in her sections difficult to read to the point where I think that something was lost in the absence of flow, but that might be just me.)
If you've read Hornby in the past, and you enjoyed his stuff, then by all means, pick this one up, although you can probably live with a library copy, because there's not so much meat to this one that you'll want to read it again, or passages so quotable that you'll want them around for reference when you are having that sort of day. This book is readable, it was a loverly poolside companion this past weekend, and I was compelled to stay up later to finish it off, but it will not be cracking any of my top fives.
If you haven't read Hornby, stop reading my gibberish and go read High Fidelity because that one is most definitely worth it.
One other little thing that I found highly amusing...
At some point in the novel, they start something of a book club, deciding to read books by authors that have killed themselves, in this section Jess said something that I just loved,
"We started with Virginia Woolf, and I only read like two pages of this book about a lighthouse, but I read enough to know why she killed herself: She killed herself because she couldn't make herself understood. You only have to read one sentence to see that." (page 189).
Now I'm not saying that I think that Virginia Wolfe was not a brilliant writer, but I can say that I did find the beginning of To The Lighthouse more than a tad bit dense the first time that I read it, and therefore, I found this reference amusing.
Also, randomly but amusingly, Jess starts this chapter with a reference to a poem that her character has never read, which also amused me. She says, "Someone should write a song or something called 'They Fuck You Up, Your Mom and Dad." Which of course is the first line of a highly amusing poem, which I will include here, because if you have not read it, you should have, and it's in moments like this that I can contribute the to education of the masses.
This Be The Verse
by Phillip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mom and dad
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
A Long Way Down is about four people: Martin, JJ, Jess and Maureen. The story is told in sections with the narration switching between all four perspectives. They meet on the top of a building on New Years Eve. All of them have come there to jump, but none of them do. The book follows them for the next three months or so, documenting how their lives and relationships change after they choose to keep on living.
But it's not a warm fuzzy book, and these are truly flawed characters. In particular, Jess is NUTS, and highly annoying. She's abrasive, she attacks people verbally, with clear intent to harm. You hate her, and at the same time, you feel for her, and feel bad for her, because sometimes, life sucks. (As an aside, in the sections that are written from her perspective, there are no quotation marks, or as she calls them "speech marks" because she supposedly doesn't know how to use them. While not knowing how to use quotation marks was a cute little character point, and I can see where it helped the author to distinguish her style from the other characters, something that must have been part of the challenge of writing the novel from four different perspectives, it only made any dialogue in her sections difficult to read to the point where I think that something was lost in the absence of flow, but that might be just me.)
If you've read Hornby in the past, and you enjoyed his stuff, then by all means, pick this one up, although you can probably live with a library copy, because there's not so much meat to this one that you'll want to read it again, or passages so quotable that you'll want them around for reference when you are having that sort of day. This book is readable, it was a loverly poolside companion this past weekend, and I was compelled to stay up later to finish it off, but it will not be cracking any of my top fives.
If you haven't read Hornby, stop reading my gibberish and go read High Fidelity because that one is most definitely worth it.
One other little thing that I found highly amusing...
At some point in the novel, they start something of a book club, deciding to read books by authors that have killed themselves, in this section Jess said something that I just loved,
"We started with Virginia Woolf, and I only read like two pages of this book about a lighthouse, but I read enough to know why she killed herself: She killed herself because she couldn't make herself understood. You only have to read one sentence to see that." (page 189).
Now I'm not saying that I think that Virginia Wolfe was not a brilliant writer, but I can say that I did find the beginning of To The Lighthouse more than a tad bit dense the first time that I read it, and therefore, I found this reference amusing.
Also, randomly but amusingly, Jess starts this chapter with a reference to a poem that her character has never read, which also amused me. She says, "Someone should write a song or something called 'They Fuck You Up, Your Mom and Dad." Which of course is the first line of a highly amusing poem, which I will include here, because if you have not read it, you should have, and it's in moments like this that I can contribute the to education of the masses.
This Be The Verse
by Phillip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mom and dad
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-stylen hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself.
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