2006-05-30 - 1:30 a.m. - High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby
No entries in a while, but I've read a lot of stuff. We'll catch up sometime, or the archive site will.
Anyway. High Fidelity: Predictable and conservative midlife-crisis novel working in the conventions of 90's Londonian yuppie romance plots (cf, Talking To Addison), with record-store geekism as marketable window-dressing to add air of hipness. The portrayal of the record store dudes is sometimes right on the money and sometimes so far off that it really breaks the flow, but there are some nice unpredictable moments in this vein that jump out - like the snooty band that ends up playing a brilliantly popist set while somehow simultaneously disdaining the "populism" of their audience. That doublethink is spot-on in a way that all the fake band names and record-store listmaking antics isn't - do people really get obsessively into "top five" lists with no associated open-ended discussion? The whole idea of nerds in the company of other nerds is that they're going to go on at length about stuff, not just make lists and snort derisively. Within each other's own company we can actually be quite charming.
So much for the window-dressing. The real narrative of the book is "guy in his mid-thirties is in denial that he's in denial, and acts out childishly against his girlfriend & cetera, until he finally comes around and accepts his place in life." Until you get to the coming-around part this is sort of workable, and Hornby gets some genuinely convincing and "Uh oh, this guy sounds worrisomely like me" moments pinpointing the guy's neurotic peevishness. Unfortunately, this means that the main character is by and large an obnoxious prat, with his girlfriend cast as a patient saint who's already figured it all out. These roles, while essential to establish the dichotomy between the Peter Pan figure and the world that's waiting for him to grow up, don't lend themselves to much complexity in their interactions, so the narrative has to keep falling back on out-of-the-blue events to initiate change.
And yet....I mean, it only took a few days to knock things out, and at least for a while I was really into it. Hornby nails the insecurity and manliness stuff so much that it's easy to forgive him when he falls back on "I guess what it really is is that I'm afraid of dying!" It's really only after I put it down that I went, "Wait, was that it?" So don't expect a Great Novel Of Our Times; just throw it in the beach-read stack and it'll end up being the best book you end up smearing with sunscreen all summer.