Now This is What I Call How to be Good

A Long Way Down
By Nick Hornby
$14 trade paperback
(Yes, I actually paid for a new book, rather than just taking something off the free table!)

I guess I'm a Nick Hornby fan. I've read every one of his books, except Fever Pitch because, well, it's about soccer. Anyway, I really liked his past couple of books of criticism, one on music and one on books, but his previous novel, How to be Good, was a big disappointment. I got the feeling that he was tiring of his light, comic, pop-culture saturated style and was trying to do something deeper. But it didn't work.

So, I got a little nervous when I heard about the premise of this new one: Four strangers go up to the top of an apartment building in London with the intention of killing themselves, but then meet up and turn into a disfunctional support group. It sounds simultaneously too dark to be funny and too comic to be dark.

Fortunately, Hornby gets away with it. He switches narrators between the four people, and that helps relieve the depression factor. It helps that one of the four is an out-of-control bigmouth college-age girl, because the other three get the chance to describe her annoying behavior. And, although Hornby is good at nipping things in the bud when they start to get too sentimental or too close to formula.

I heard Hornby talking about this book on "Fresh Air" recently, and Terry Gross kept asking him about suicide. At one point, he sort of pointedly said, "There are jokes in it, too!"

And there are a lot of jokes in it. It's much funnier than, say, "Better Off Dead," starring John Cusack. Speaking of Cusack, I saw Hornby do a reading some years ago and he was talking about the then-upcoming film version of High Fidelity. He said that they were going to set it in America, which he wasn't too happy about, but that it would star John Cusack, so he was optimistic. On "Fresh Air," he said that the screen rights to A Long Way Down had been purchased by Johnny Depp. Gross asked if Depp would play the part of JJ, the failed rock guitarist, and Hornby suggested that Depp might instead play the part of Martin, the middle-aged TV host who lost his job and destroyed his marriage when he was imprisoned for having sex with a 15-year-old. Hornby said he respected that.

I thought it would have been too easy to cast About a Boy's star, Hugh Grant, for that part.