A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
I’ve enjoyed a different one of Nick Hornby’s books, so this seemed like a safer bet to spend money on than some of the other audiobooks out there. The story revolves around four very, very different characters, and the actors do a good job with them, so it’s a solid choice for an audiobook.
The premise, as you’ll get by reading any blurb, is that four people meet on the top of a building, each intending to throw themselves off. As you learn more about their stories, you learn that they have pretty solid reasons. Martin has been publicly humiliated and had his career destroyed after having sex with a 15-year-old. Maureen has been doing nothing with her life except care for her totally disabled 20-year-old son. JJ, who lives for music, just had his band break up and his girlfriend dump him. Jess is upset because some loser dumped her, but she’s pretty crazy, and a dumb teen too, so she doesn’t need as solid of a reason.
The three older characters decide that Jess is too young to kill herself, so they prevent her from jumping by sitting on her. Then they decide that they’ll help her find the guy who dumped her so she can get an explanation from him, since she never got one, and she thinks that will keep her from killing herself.
After they find her loser boyfriend (who dumped Jess because she was crazy, which she is), the four find other reasons to both stick together and to not kill themselves. They decide to delay killing themselves until the next popular suicide date, February 14th. They sell a story to the tabloids about seeing an angel, then blow it all when they admit they’re lying. They try to fix one another’s lives by giving Maureen a vacation, and by trying to fix Martin back up with his ex-wife.
The story was a lot less soppy than it could have been. They don’t really do a lot to fix one anothers’ problems, but one of the themes of the book seemed to be that their problems were nearly entirely of their own making. Jess has no friends because she doesn’t think before she speaks. Maureen doesn’t get out because she doesn’t choose to. Martin’s excuse “she told me she was sixteen” doesn’t really change the fact that he’s a slimy pervert. And JJ laments his lost band and girlfriend, but he doesn’t really try hard to find new ones.
Some of the elements of this novel were cringe-worthy ridiculous, particularly the bit with the angel. The dialogue is quite vulgar, especially when Jess speaks, because she has no brain-mouth filter, but it’s also quite catty, which is fun for a while. Despite that, the novel had an underlying subtlety to it. Every time I started to dislike a character enough to hope they’d just climb back up the stairs and jump, they’d say something insightful or introspective enough for me to want them to find some way out.
That fact is what kept a book about four potential suicides from being utterly depressing. Because what they’re all looking for, without realizing, is a ray of hope. They’re all looking to jostle their lives enough that their life becomes tolerable again. None of them have profound changes in their lives, they just change each other enough that they’re able to find small changes, some small relief that lets them get on and cope.
I usually get a little irritated with the actors’ voices after a while (particularly the way in which men do women’s voices) The actors got most of the cadences down. (Only a few glitches, here and there, like when JJ was talking to Eddie and I coudln’t tell which was which, or when Jess used less vulgarity and sounded like Maureen.) It could also be a factor of audiobooks that the pacing seemed off. There were twenty minute stretches thath seemed too long, and I don’t know if I would have read it faster if I had it in book form, or if the story just got boring, or maybe both.
The story, however, is as solid as Hornby’s other book. I recommend it for people who don’t flinch at vulgarities, for people who like to read about characters whose lives are more pathetic than their own, and for people who want a novel set in London.
