{"id":349,"date":"2006-01-12T12:28:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-12T12:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=349"},"modified":"2006-01-12T12:28:00","modified_gmt":"2006-01-12T12:28:00","slug":"10-pages-in-book-review-a-long-way-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2006\/01\/12\/10-pages-in-book-review-a-long-way-down\/","title":{"rendered":"10-pages-in book review: A Long Way Down"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the best parts of the holidays is having a little bit of extra time for reading, once the chaos that is Christmas abates. By sheer luck, my turn in the queue for Nick Hornby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s A Long Way Down<\/em> came up after a wait of several weeks just in time for me to indulge in a little holiday reading, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m just far enough in to offer the latest in my ongoing series of 10-pages-in book reviews <\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even if you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t recognize Nick Hornby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll recognize the titles of some of his books that have been made into movies: Fever Pitch <\/a>, High Fidelity <\/a>, and About A Boy<\/a>. I have to admit, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never read any of them, but High Fidelity is one of my favourite movies – mostly because I have a thing for John Cusack. But when I realized that the same person had written all these books, I had to take him out for a spin and check out his goods for myself. And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how a literary crush is born.<\/p>\n

But back, for a moment, to the book. A Long Way Down<\/em> is the story of four people whose lives, on an ordinary day, would likely never intersect. But this is no ordinary place, and no ordinary day. It is, in fact, New Year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Day, and our four protagonists meet on the roof of a 15-story building in London, where each of them have come to commit suicide.<\/p>\n

The story is told, by turns, through each of their eyes in a first-person narrative. Hornby does a wonderful job of making each character\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s voice distinctive, so you never have to flip back to the beginning of a chapter to see who is speaking.<\/p>\n

Martin is a smart, bitter C-list celebrity, a former breakfast television host who has become more infamous than famous after getting caught having a fling with a fifteen year old. He says of his suicidal tendencies: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153On New Year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Eve, it felt as though I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be saying goodbye to a dim form of consciousness and a semi-functioning digestive system – all the indications of a life, certainly, but none of the content. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even feel sad, particularly. I just feel very stupid, and very angry.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

JJ is an American who had aspirations to be a rock star but finds himself delivering pizzas. He quotes Oscar Wilde but can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t utter an entire sentence without using fuck as an adjective or an adverb. He tells us, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The trouble with my generation is that we all think we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re fucking geniuses. Making something isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something; we have to be something. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s our inalienable right as citizens of the twenty-first century. If Christina Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol<\/em> jerk can be something, then why can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t I? Where\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mine, huh?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Jess is a wild and unstable young woman. I know her type so well, and yet am having a hard time describing her. She inhabits the polar opposite of my life of stability, sunshine and acceptance. She is shallow and thoughtless, and says whatever comes into her head. When another character mentions being engaged, Jess is shocked by the concept: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You did? Really? Okay, but what living people get engaged? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not interested in people out of the Ark. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not interested in people with, with like shoes and raincoats and whatever.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d People with shoes and raincoats don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t deserve respect in Jess\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 world.<\/p>\n

And finally, there is Maureen, a middle-aged woman who has spent the last 20 years of her life as a single mother caring for a severely disabled son who can neither move independently nor communicate with her. Her innocent naivety born of inexperience is a foil for Jess\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s overly well-informed naivety. In considering JJ, Maureen thinks, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153without knowing anything about him [I thought] that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they? I know they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t invent gayness, because that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

(Sorry for the extensive quoting, but really, I could go on for days pulling lovely little bits out of this book.)<\/p>\n

Their lives intersect on the roof, where each has come to commit suicide \u00e2\u20ac\u201c some with more forethought than others. Distracted by their shared misery \u00e2\u20ac\u201c misery being about the only thing they have in common \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the unlikely quartet find that the moment for suicide has passed. Suspended in a strange limbo of thwarted suicidal intent, detached from the painful reality of their lives at least until the sun comes up, they band together for a kind of quest, and set off into the darkness of New Year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Eve to find the fellow who has broken Jess\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 heart. Really. When you read the book, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get it. By turns madcaply comic and painfully insightful, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a moving and unforgettable story.<\/p>\n

I officially have a crush on Nick Hornby now, in much the same way I have a crush on Douglas Coupland. (Is it weird that I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have much patience for chick lit, but am developing a thing for lad lit<\/a>?) Hornby and Coupland are, in fact, very similar writers. They have the same ear for dialogue and eye for quirky characters, and both have their finger firmly placed on the pulse of modern culture. They both use humour and pathos to evoke how it feels to be alive and watching the world in the twenty-first century. Where Coupland\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work clearly echoes his own Canadian-ness, Hornby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book is infused with what he referred to in a Guardian interview <\/a>as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153English miserablism\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. I love this term \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it captures perfectly the distinctive flavour of this novel and its characters.<\/p>\n

I haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been this excited about a book since The Time Traveler\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Wife<\/a>. Hornby is such an excellent writer that I’m disappointed I haven’t discovered him before now. I could go on \u00e2\u20ac\u201c there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so much more to say. Except I have to get over to the library Web site and reserve a few more of Hornby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s books, because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to need a really good book when this one is done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the best parts of the holidays is having a little bit of extra time for reading, once the chaos that is Christmas abates. By sheer luck, my turn in the queue for Nick Hornby\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s A Long Way Down came up after a wait of several weeks just in time for me to indulge … Continue reading “10-pages-in book review: A Long Way Down”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-10-pages-in"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}