White Noise

I have come to the conclusion that all of Nick Hornby’s early work is the same. That’s okay, because it’s what he does well, and he had to find his bearings somehow. He’s better when he branches out a bit, though.

His first novel, High Fidelity, resembles in initial structure his subsequent two. It begins with a malcontented, promiscuous man (although in How to be Good it was a woman) who recognizes that something is wrong with his life, but is somewhat apathetic as far as actually doing anything about it. Rob has just been dumped by his live-in girlfriend, Laura, and pretends he doesn’t care, and then does care, and then does a lot of things to attempt revenge, which are completely ineffectual. He works at a record shop, and cares about little other than music and sex and, it turns out, Laura. Maybe.

It’s not as briskly plotted or disguisedly deep as his other novels. It spends a great deal of time wallowing in Rob’s previous girlfriends, and attempting to make sense of the reasons why they all left him. The great personality changes and reversions and mood swings, all seeming perfectly authentic in their very exaggeration, that characterize Hornby’s other novels are mostly absent here.

For some reason, this novel just doesn’t lend itself to dissection. But since I’ve now read all of Hornby’s novels, and liked them all—just to varying degrees—and since a large part of High Fidelity involves making lists, I think I’ll make one.

1. A Long Way Down—the only one of his novels that breaks the promiscuous-middle-aged-relationship-mending cycle of Hornby novels, though, given that the book revolves around a bunch of attempted suicides, the malcontented part is here in force.


2. How to be Good—clever and smart, and the novel in which Hornby elevated exaggeration to an art form. He’s also at his most socially aware here, looking out beyond the screwed-up lives of his protagonists, which are plenty colorful on their own.


3. About a Boy—sweet, simple.


4. High Fidelity

As a first novelist, I feel terrible that those are ranked, as well as in order of my favorites, in order of publication. It’s the unfortunate truth, though—Hornby is without question a writer who improved significantly with each novel. I guess practice is good for something.