Nick Hornby's "A Long Way Down" is a fine comic novel about four people who all arrive at Topper's House, a quite-tall-enough London building well known to the suicidal, on New Year's Eve. However, it so happens that these four very different folks manage not to kill themselves right then. They pull together, in their own strange ways, in the hours, days and weeks after their chance meeting.

One, JJ, is a an American musician whose career has nosedived. Martin is a Brit telly host caught in scandal. Maureen is a legitimately depressed middle-aged single mom with a vegetable son. Jess is a foul-mouthed junior cabinet minister's daughter whose sister has gone missing.

Hornby - who happens to know music like few other contemporary novelists - has written a bunch of great London-set novels. I've read and loved each one. This one started out just a bit dodgy, but it really gets going. A lot of good books are like that, actually.

I'll not tell you much more, so as not to give away the story, but I must share this one bit of dialogue, where the four protagonists meet for one of their perhaps ill-considered book discussions, of authors who have attempted suicide. Here is the off-color teenager Jess, talking about Virginia Woolf.

F****** hell! You should try to read the stuff by people who've killed themselves! 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. I sort of identify with her a bit, because I suffer from that sometimes, but her mistake was to go public with it.

From the mouths of babes......

You can't beat Nick Hornby for contemporary fiction. His priors include the smashing debut, later and against-all-odds rendered into a great movie starring John Cusack, High Fidelity; plus About A Boy; and How To Be Good.

The current Hornby novel is also, in an entirely secondary manner, a fine, if minor compendium of English insult terms. These include "git," "tosser", and "berk." Sadly lacking is that fine specimen of Scottish calumny, "bamstick."

Ah, well. Next time, perhaps.

TECHNORATI TAGS: NICK HORNBY, A LONG WAY DOWN, FICTION, READING, BOOKS

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at November 22, 2005 09:46 PM