A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby
Riverhead

In the beginning there was Nick, and only Nick. He wrote about pop music. He wrote about soccer. He wrote about relationships in a couple of novels — "High Fidelity" and "About A Boy." And grateful American and British readers bought and loved Nick Hornby's books. And it was good.

But there soon came the motion picture deals, prestigious literary awards and the great piles of filthy lucre. And lo Nick who had been Only Nick was cleaved in two — into Hollywood Nick and Man-Booker Nick — the former dazzled by the bright lights of Tinseltown, the latter subjugated to the demands of Serious Literature. For several years, the two Nicks struggled against each other in the body of Nick Hornby, and although Nick continued to write, something was amiss. When he published again, the readers bought his books and scratched their heads and wondered what had gone wrong. And it wasn't exactly good.

Such is the story behind Hornby's latest novel, "A Long Way Down," a promising and ambitious but ultimately disappointing book. Over the years, Hornby's characters have been tortured, broken and cynical, yet romantic and, in the end, charmingly sympathetic. As a result of his heart and soul, almost all of his works for the page and screen have been popular without the benefit of killer dinosaurs, robots, superheroes or exploding gasoline tankers. "A Long Way Down" doesn't veer too far from the author's usual humanistic terrain, although the premise does seem a bit unusual for him. At the start of the novel, four characters from quite different walks of life find themselves at the top of a notorious London suicide spot on New Year's Eve. All four, for reasons we later discover, have motives for hurling themselves into the cruel night and plunging splat to their deaths. Yet, somehow, when the four of them are together, they just can't seem to go through with it. Instead, they come down from the top of the building and decide to try to solve one another's problems.

Hornby chooses to share the narration among his suicidal quartet, an ambitious storytelling tactic that requires a deft writerly touch with tone and style. To that end, we have the first-person voice of Martin, the snooty, disgraced talk show host; of Maureen, the weary single mother of a severely handicapped young man; of Jess, the crude, angry, spoiled daughter of a member of parliament; and JJ, the American in London whose rock band has just broken up. You can hear the phones of casting directors ringing.

Unfortunately, Hornby lacks the stylistic chops to write convincingly in the voices of these four varied characters throughout the book. He does his best with the two older, English characters of Martin and Maureen, but Jess's persona is far too profane and illogical to be enjoyable, and JJ's "American" voice is just weird, as if assembled from a lifetime of watching movies about Americans. Hornby may get close to how these characters should sound, but he does not succeed in mimicking how they would think. In this, "A Long Way Down" reads more like the first draft of a screenplay than a fully-developed novel of character. For three of his four primary narrative personae, Hornby has created unsympathetic, uninteresting jerks. Only Maureen, with her tragic family situation, seems remotely understandable; the others are simply annoying whiners. Fine, readers may find themselves thinking, give your money to Maureen and go ahead and jump already. Even if Hornby were trying to make some grand point about the culture of narcissism — well, even narcissistic characters have to be engaging.

What this novel needs is a few velociraptors. The four near-suicides could wander about contemporary London making and unmaking messes of their lives, and, just when we least expected it, one of these unpleasant people could become a nice snack for a big old lizard. Now that would be a good movie. And perhaps a better book. But Hollywood Nick is fighting Man-Booker Nick throughout this novel, and the author's crisis of identity seems to be showing — the entertainer and the man-of-letters cannot agree on where to go.

Readers have to respect Hornby for his aspirations in "A Long Way Down," as well as his willingness to work with such potentially dark subject matter. But he won't plunge into the blackest depths of suicidal desperation to find the bitter humor of a truly hopeless person scraping along the bottom of life. What we have, instead, is a clever concoction of Suicide Lite, ready-made for Hollywood, where the darkness is never too dark and whatever our problems may be, they'll get better if we just keep our chins up.

— Mark Hayes (mark.e.hayes at gmail dot com)