High Anxiety
A LONG WAY DOWN, by Nick Hornby. Riverhead, 333 pp., $24.95.
“People don’t jump from buildings anymore,” declares a stylish woman in “7 Stories,” a 1990 play by the comically deadpan Morris Panych. “Why not?” asks the unnamed hero who is, in fact, standing on a ledge. “The trend is much lighter,” she says. “More whimsical.” Everyone has theories about suicide, but in this unexistential though self-absorbed time it’s not a favorite cocktail-party subject. In “A Long Way Down,” the never merely funny Nick Hornby makes it into one, and the cocktail party happens on the ledge itself.
The four mourners-revelers in “A Long Way Down” are spending New Year’s Eve at a popular suicide spot. Separately, they’ve all climbed to the roof of the ghoulish London landmark Toppers’ House and intend to come down the hard way, but instead, they end up—as Maureen, a self-conscious older woman, phrases it—”nattering.” To her, talking is just a way to fill the hours, except during confession at the church that’s her sole community; her extremely disabled son, Matty, can’t speak.
In contrast, the other three value speech as a means to an end—that of self-expression and enlightenment or, at least, exhibitionism. Thus, although they can’t stop bickering to save their lives, they talk nonstop. Jess is a wild 18-year-old girl with a haunted family and the social graces of the Tasmanian Devil. JJ is American, a youngish rock guitarist dashed by the breakup of both his band and his idea of himself as a hybrid of Nick Drake and Pauline Kael. Martin is nationally notorious, a preachy TV host just out of jail for sleeping with a buxom minor—career suicide, in other words. Like the others, Martin thinks he knows all the angles, and that’s why he’s dangling his feet over the edge of the 15-story Toppers’ House.
Or is it? What Hornby does so brilliantly here—using each lost soul as a prism to magnify the others—is to make us see that there may be other reasons the four have ended up on the rooftop as, in Martin’s phrase, “the Kings and Queens of Shambles.” The themes of Hornby’s other work—love, obsession, popular music, child-rearing, success, loneliness, how to be good (as his last book’s title put it)—are cranked up to 11 here. The answer’s far from simple.
Despite our thirst for brashly green novelists, there’s a reason we turn back to seasoned writers. These writers, like Hornby, have lived longer, in both creative and concrete terms; it’s very much worth noting that Hornby has a severely autistic son, Danny. Illness of all kinds is a major motif here, and it’s not the first time Hornby has examined suicidal behavior specifically; Fiona in “About a Boy” actually tries it.
Hornby structures “A Long Way Down” as a kind of “Behind the Music,” with people taking turns dishing to an unspecified listener some time in the future. Some of these monologues are novelistically descriptive, others reflective, but all contain the affectations, slips, tics and curses—especially curses—of each character’s speech. The result recalls the rhythmic rise and fall of Nicholson Baker’s “Vox.” By the end of this dramatic, sad and thoroughly side-splitting novel, there are odd chimes going on in unlikely pairs. The grating girl and the pompous old fool, who can’t stand each other, are suddenly thinking along the same lines. The sad Catholic and the Cobain-ophile start agreeing on a plan.
There are arguments, which the four are happy to detail in their meanest spats, for all of these people’s untimely deaths, but there’s also a wealth of arguments against. Out of all this mirthless mirth comes—wondrously—actual wisdom about not just how to be good but how to live, if not well, at least better than badly.
Only very occasionally does all this not work like a charm. The lower-class Maureen is, even given her isolation, almost unbelievably unaware of basic facts of modern life. As she starts opening up to the implied listener like a cleared storm drain, she becomes increasingly sympathetic—but it seems unfair that it should take so long for her true nature to reveal itself when even the most disgraceful of the other characters get to be canny and expressive as they tell their stories. And although, as others will eventually do, we may come to feel parental toward Jess against our will, she’s awfully hard to take; the men are the educated wits.
And yet even this statement contains its own opposite. Maureen and Jess are lovely characters, full of heart and thought, and we cherish them by the end of the book. Although there’s no Hugh Grant part in the (forthcoming) movie, this time that’s a relief. No one in “A Long Way Down” gets off easily, and no one escapes our uneasy, fierce protectiveness.
