The opening chapter of this book ends: "I warn you: this is a story as hard to hear as it is for me to tell" and that's the truth. The "me" telling the story changes by chapter, but by the time you're four or five deep (they're only 3 or 4 pages each) you know whose speaking without the benefit of markers. Certain dates get narrated by an omniscient narrator, who sounds most like Mr. Dees, who is the first narrator the reader meets and arguably the "main" character. Although that might ultimately be a matter of timing, every character is convincingly flushed out spread eagle in their few pages throughout the novel.
The central event of the novel is the disappearance of a young girl, who is dramatically, universally beloved by everyone - even those who don't know it yet - in her fictional Indiana town. The novel slowly unfolds, unraveling the mystery of what happened to the little girl and at the hands of whom. A third of the way in, the action takes a back seat to the character development. The slow unfolding of the pathos just under the surface of every character: rich, poor, happy, sad, male, female, young and old.
In the end, it is our secrets that both hold us together and send us into spontaneous combustion - a slow building, eventual spontaneous combustion. It's not a new idea, but it's successfully executed until the final thirty pages. Maybe it's because I read it all in one sitting and the sad might have gotten to be too much or the drama to intense, but it just kind of lost me. The dignity of the characters began to seep away, they moved from unsympathetic, real people to something else.
Maybe it's the central event - the disappearance and misuse of a child is not something most people can gloss over at the end and no matter how convincingly culpability gets spread among "everyman" in the novel. And maybe it's the direct, calculated way that point is made in the final pages. However, at the end of the day, some of us are more culpable than others and some acts of cowardice, or even non-acts, are just as violent as the ones executed by those who are armed. More importantly, they might be harder to forgive.
A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby
It might just be the place I'm in these days, or the season with all of the holiday bullshit, or my predisposition to depression, but this book did not make me laugh.ever.once.
That is not to say I didn't love it. I have to be honest, I've not read any Hornby since High Fidelity. Somehow he fell off my radar, and if it weren't for a delayed flight in Chicago a week ago he might not have found his back on, but low and behold there in the window right across from the gate that would own my ass for the next 5 hours, Hornby.
A Long Way Down is a book about 4 almost suicides that probably never really would have been and one definite suicide that we know virtually nothing about. Again, taking my above mentioned predispositions to heart, I have to say this book rang about as sadly, pathetically, and shockingly true as anything else I've ever read on the subject. There is no romance here. I don't just mean that Hornby takes all the mystery and romance out of the act itself, but he robs the survival of any melodramatic, hopeful romance too. There are no kittens running through the fields while resurrected families picnic in the foreground when this book is over - but I like Hornby's final image far better than I would have liked that.
Every single one of the characters in this book is fucked in the way that people you know are fucked, or that you are yourself. That's not to say they don't have issues with which you may not have dealt, but you could paste a host of your own over theirs and get the same psychological result - and that's what's scary. At one point, a lying, cheating, suck of a husband wrecks his own car because it's "easier than actually telling the truth. That look you get, the look which lets you see right through the eyes and down into the place where she keeps and the hurt and the rage and the loathing...who wouldn't go that extra yard to avoid it." And who reads that and can't think of all the little things they do in the course of the day that are the equivalent of this guy's car wreck? We all do it. Some just do it larger than others. The book is full of scenes you've lived between people you know. It vacillates between fatalistic, hopeful, pathetic, and eventually just being. I did not laugh once, and I will be honest, I cried more than once. It wasn't a sad cry though, or not wholly. It was the kind of cry you have when even knowing something really bad is okay if you aren't the only one.
There are moments of community among the mismatched foursome that didn't. They bond speciously over music, the beach, swearing. The brevity of these exchanges says more about humans and community and want than any number of psychological tomes out there. It works because Hornby gives us these truths and these experiences of these people and flat out refuses to let us feel sorry for them - ever. You relate because you can't stand to feel sorry for them anymore than you can stand the self pity you briefly allow yourself driving home alone at the end of the day. It's just too...ick, And they would punch you in the throat, everyone single one of them, if you offered them your sympathy anyway. So they all escape caricature, and we respect them even if we don't like them; We want them to be okay even though we know they did it to themselves.
The characters' message over and over again in the book is that people who are sad don't fit in. As a culture, we don't know what to do with them, and yet, it demonstrates clearly that we're all sad most of the time - some of us climb to the top of Topper Tower and some of us don't -- but it's clear in A Long Way Down that the climbing or not may be the only difference among us.
That is not to say I didn't love it. I have to be honest, I've not read any Hornby since High Fidelity. Somehow he fell off my radar, and if it weren't for a delayed flight in Chicago a week ago he might not have found his back on, but low and behold there in the window right across from the gate that would own my ass for the next 5 hours, Hornby.
A Long Way Down is a book about 4 almost suicides that probably never really would have been and one definite suicide that we know virtually nothing about. Again, taking my above mentioned predispositions to heart, I have to say this book rang about as sadly, pathetically, and shockingly true as anything else I've ever read on the subject. There is no romance here. I don't just mean that Hornby takes all the mystery and romance out of the act itself, but he robs the survival of any melodramatic, hopeful romance too. There are no kittens running through the fields while resurrected families picnic in the foreground when this book is over - but I like Hornby's final image far better than I would have liked that.
Every single one of the characters in this book is fucked in the way that people you know are fucked, or that you are yourself. That's not to say they don't have issues with which you may not have dealt, but you could paste a host of your own over theirs and get the same psychological result - and that's what's scary. At one point, a lying, cheating, suck of a husband wrecks his own car because it's "easier than actually telling the truth. That look you get, the look which lets you see right through the eyes and down into the place where she keeps and the hurt and the rage and the loathing...who wouldn't go that extra yard to avoid it." And who reads that and can't think of all the little things they do in the course of the day that are the equivalent of this guy's car wreck? We all do it. Some just do it larger than others. The book is full of scenes you've lived between people you know. It vacillates between fatalistic, hopeful, pathetic, and eventually just being. I did not laugh once, and I will be honest, I cried more than once. It wasn't a sad cry though, or not wholly. It was the kind of cry you have when even knowing something really bad is okay if you aren't the only one.
There are moments of community among the mismatched foursome that didn't. They bond speciously over music, the beach, swearing. The brevity of these exchanges says more about humans and community and want than any number of psychological tomes out there. It works because Hornby gives us these truths and these experiences of these people and flat out refuses to let us feel sorry for them - ever. You relate because you can't stand to feel sorry for them anymore than you can stand the self pity you briefly allow yourself driving home alone at the end of the day. It's just too...ick, And they would punch you in the throat, everyone single one of them, if you offered them your sympathy anyway. So they all escape caricature, and we respect them even if we don't like them; We want them to be okay even though we know they did it to themselves.
The characters' message over and over again in the book is that people who are sad don't fit in. As a culture, we don't know what to do with them, and yet, it demonstrates clearly that we're all sad most of the time - some of us climb to the top of Topper Tower and some of us don't -- but it's clear in A Long Way Down that the climbing or not may be the only difference among us.
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