I finished Nick Hornby’s latest, A Long Way Down, recently and it’s definitely worth the time. The story involves four main characters, and each chapter switches from one character’s perspective to another. At first, this may seem a bit distracting or even confusing. For me, at least, the beginning of a new book is my chance to become familiar with the protagonist – to get to know their voice and personality. When this voice changes every dozen pages or so, it takes a little longer to get things straight in your head – remembering the back-story of each character, and such. Fortunately, these four characters are extremely different. The burden of the switching back and forth is far, far less with these characters. The only real problem, then, is that most of the dialog is between two or more of these characters. In some instances of an extended dialog which then continued with commentary on the situation by that particular chapter’s “voice”, I found myself sometimes briefly forgetting from whose perspective the story was being told. It may only take a few sentences to recognize the tone or dialect or vocabulary of the “main character” for a given chapter, but that’s still a few sentences you may find yourself re-reading when you realize you were imagining them from the wrong character’s perspective. Again…not a huge problem, and probably far reduced if you read the book for longer periods, as opposed to the 35–45 minutes a night (just before sleeping) which I gave to it.
The dialog was very good, though Jess - the bitch-from-hell teenager – dominated too often and was, at times, a bit too harsh for me to believe. I’ve known my share of asshole teenagers, but this girl was a bit over-the-top on occasion. JJ was my favorite of the four. His way of rolling things around in his head to produce a depressing reality of his life, while at the same time feeling as though his problems were not “big” enough for the group, was excellently done and his resolution - though tied up a bit too quickly – felt more “right” to me than the others.
All in all, I’d recommend this book, as the dialog is very good and quite funny at times. While some may find the story lacking in purpose or direction or resolution, I actually find that to be a plus. This is about life – four people having trouble dealing with it and looking for a way out. If you expect a book that starts with the main characters on the verge of suicide to end all nice and neat and happy and bubbly, put the book down ‘cause it ain’t gonna happen.
