Three of the four are proto-Hornby characters: Martin, Jess and JJ are charmingly verbose, introspective and full of cultural references. However, it is middle-aged Maureen whom I identified with the most. She compares life to a television program about a Scottish detective who had family problems:
“In an hour-long program, there was probably ten minutes of him arguing with his ex-wide and his children, and fifty minutes of him trying to find [the murderer]. That’s about right to me, ten minutes an hour [dealing with problems]. But there have been lots of times when I couldn’t stop [my son] from becoming sixty minutes an hour, and when you do that, you’re bound to end up on the roof of Topper’s House.”
I really enjoyed the novel. It is a quick read, a slim volume. It’s better than How To Be Good, though not to the level of About A Boy or High Fidelity.
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I do have a very personal experience with suicide. Late one winter night, while I was driving home from a movie, I had received a tearful phone call from my friend Susannah. She was crying inconsolably, gasping out every word. She could not take a breath, there was so much grief pouring out of her. I tried to calm her down for a nearly an hour, listening and comforting.
Then suddenly, she was quiet. She had finally calmed down, I thought. After a minute of silence, she said, “Thank you, Paul. Goodbye.”
As I got ready for bed, I couldn’t shake the bad feeling I had. I put on my pants and drove to Susannah’s apartment and knocked loudly at her door, calling out her name. I didn’t care about waking the neighbors even though it was past midnight.
I couldn’t hear anything. I don’t know how long I knocked. It couldn’t have been too long, but it felt like ages.
Susannah opened the door. I was relieved. The apartment was completely dark when I entered. I went from room to room, turning on lights. I didn’t know what I was looking for. A gun. Pills. A toilet plunger. I don’t know.
When I got to the kitchen, I found all the windows were shut and the cracks under the doors were sealed with towels. The oven was turned on, its door lying open. On the floor in front of it, I found a blanket and a tear-soaked pillow.
Article comments
1 - Phillip Winn
This post is simply amazing. Wow.
The Hornby novel sounds great. How can it lose with such a setup? Warned that it doesn't reacht he heights of High Fidelity, I'm still going to check it out.
Thanks for this.
2 - No Milk
Thanks Phillip. I did a He said, She said sorta thing on my blog. You can check out what She said.
3 - Victor Plenty
Interesting contrasts emerge from your writing, No Milk. You speak with some sensitivity and compassion about the pressures and dangers of being different, when being different means being gay.
And yet, as part of the "humor" in your piece, you employ vicious backhanded insults against two separate public figures who happen to be female, heavy, and black.
Of course I know you didn't intend any racism. Nobody sane ever intends any racism anymore. Even most of the very few people who still secretly believe in racism are embarrassed to admit it in public.
I'm old enough to remember when many white people still told thoughtless and vicious jokes about black racial stereotypes, without any embarrassment, nor any idea they might be hurting anyone. Those days are gone now in most communities, and good riddance to them.
But another type of thoughtless humor has slithered into the place of those old racist jokes. For some reason there is still no level of ruthless cruelty too low for a "humorist" to use in jokes that attack fat people. Fat women in particular are often assumed to have no human feelings deserving any consideration whatsoever.
I'm trying to remain as calm as possible while pointing this out to you, rather than going into full-bore counterattack mode. I'm sure you did not intend any of your remarks to become yet another cause of needless pain in anyone's life.
Yet this unintended contradiction does tend to undermine what is otherwise an admirably humane and thoughtful piece of writing.
4 - Roscoe
wonderful piece, funny as hell
5 - No Milk
Victor, thanks for your comments. I appreciate them. It did make me think about whether I was being thoughtless, and I do care about that. Humor should really be well thought out, and I didn't want to get sloppy.
I just wanted to note that when I mentioned both Oprah and Star Jones, it is their celebrity I was mocking, not their race or weight. In fact, I didn't even think about their race until you mentioned it. It could have been Rosie O'Donnell in this post instead of Oprah, but she hasn't been in the news lately and I'm sure she really wishes she were so I can mock her.
About Star Jones specifically, I also didn't mention anything about how fat she was, because that wasn't the point of the line "I think about suffocating under Star Jones and an avalanche of Payless shoes."
If I wanted to point out how fat she was, then I wouldn't have used the shoes at all. In fact, I wouldn't use Star Jones, I would use someone decidedly, well, fat, like maybe Chris Farley, because he's a man and he's admitted that he's fat and he's dead. Sarcasm here, sorry, but if I were thinking about fat people, I would concentrate on the most graphic image I can think of, and you know what? Star Jones wouldn't even make the cut.
It was the one-two punch of the low rent image shoes and the low rent celebrity that Star Jones represents that I thought particularly humorous. It does make the connotation that she's not reed thin, but I take no blame for that, it just works that way. I'd like to think that I am multi-faceted and that I think in many different levels, but really, I am just very shallow.
Oh, and I didn't pick Rosie O'Donnell to represent me here because she is perceived to be fat, white, irish, female or queer. I picked her because she wears some really tacky blazers, just so you're clear on my intentions.
I am reminded of the show Family Guy where every time a gay person is mentioned, it is in the context of AIDS, as if all gay people had AIDS or something. They even had a 5-minute song about a person having AIDS. Dang, it was FUNNY. I felt really bad for thinking it was funny, but it was. In fact, I wasn't sure I wasn't really just offended.
But that's what humor is. Laughter is a reaction we get from being uncomfortable, or from some truth. And I am not beyond using stereotypes in humor, there is some truth in them. The truth is funny, yo.
6 - Scott Butki
That is one hell of a review.
Excellent.
I love Hornby but I've heard this is one of his weaker works.