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Written by Shandy Casteel Wednesday, 30 November 2005 14:56

It’s an uneasy alliance when commercially appealing books take shape from more internal philosophical wanderings, which is why Hornby’s novels are not as tacit as they first appear.

NICK HORNBY | A LONG WAY DOWN (Riverhead; 333 pgs; $24.95)

Not surprisingly, Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down —recently short-listed for the Whitbread Book Award—was optioned by film producers even before hitting bookstore shelves. Hornby is, after all, a finely tuned fabulist with a finger on the pulse of the hipster zeitgeist, and that’s the sort of literary talent that seems to lend itself well to cinema. That, and his unbelievable knack for crafting dialogue and carving up addictive first-person tales which read like perfectly rounded screenplay treatments. Fortunately, Hornby never blatantly smashes the reader upside the head with contrived coolness. His pop reverence, amusingly compelling characters, and plainspoken narratives are always tethered to bigger heartstrings.

High Fidelity, Marcus’ mother’s attempted suicide in About a Boy, or the prickly existential dilemmas of How to Be Good, Hornby packs a little punch into each of his breezy books.

While A Long Way Down aspires the highest depths and themes yet for Hornby, its misses are equally further from their marks. The novel is broken into four intertwining lives that fate brings together on a rooftop where each had come in hopes of settling their misfired relationships and selfish doubts by tossing themselves overboard. None of them do, and so disgraced morning show personality Martin, failed American rocker and self-styled intellectual JJ, weary and woeful mother Maureen, and little-understood angry Jess form a pact as only characters in a novel do, and clamber down from their precipice to rejoin the merry-go-round that is life. As Jess says, it’s their very own Fab Four: “I just mean that I could tell we needed JJ, and so when he appeared it felt right. He wasn’t Ringo, though. He was more like Paul. Maureen was Ringo, except she wasn’t very funny. I was George, except I wasn’t shy or spiritual. Martin was John, except he wasn’t talented or cool. Thinking about it, maybe we were more like another group with four people in it.”

Even when his characters are less than the sum of their rhetorical wit, Hornby’s writing is a crispy cynical snack that goes down well. This book delivers on that talent; take the moment when JJ preens about his own reading habits: “Earlier that week—Christmas Day, to be exact—I’d finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, which is a totally awesome novel. I was actually going to jump with a copy, not only because it would have been kinda cool, and would’ve added a little mystique to my death, but because it might have been a good way of getting people to read it.”

I hope no one gets to feeling the same about A Long Way Down, because it ultimately isn’t worthy of a jump. The book doesn’t hold up to Hornby’s other work, its characters sway too much to the unlikable, though maybe that is something creative casting can fix in the film version. Fans of Hornby’s writing will find minimal pleasure here, even after it finally lands.