A Long Way Down

Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down is a (comic? attempted comic?) novel about suicide -- four strangers meet at the top of a high rise, on New Year's Eve, each planning to jump, each for different reasons.

Each chapter presents a separate character's viewpoint, so we get to get inside everyone's head. Unfortunately, none of the characters are all that distinct -- there's a mid-fifties ex-TV star, a mid-fifties mother of a disabled son, an early thirties American wannabe rock star, and a teenager. So in theory, four quite distinct personalities, both due to different generations and different circumstances. Of course, much of the insight comes from "you'd think people in my situation would feel this, but instead, I feel this," from each character, which is interesting the first dozen times, but drags a bit as it continues. And it certainly continues.

It's not that that this is a bad novel, as in ineptly executed -- I'm just not sure the way it treats suicides is . . .sensitive enough? Realistic enough? Compelling enough? The forced interaction between the characters can get painful at times. I'll give Hornby credit for not wrapping everything up with a neat little bow at the end (everything is fixed and it's like nothing ever happened!), but that's about it.

A Mencken Chrestomathy

Sweet merciful crap did it take me too long to finish this. H.L. Mencken is an American icon, but if this is him at his best, I'm not going to be inclined to seek out much more of his work. Mencken has a reputation as a gadfly, which is certainly fulfilled here, but there's also lots of conjecture, speculation without supporting evidence, and general orneriness. Mencken can certainly turn a phrase (a nice line to end another vignette I wasn’t enamored with: "if women, continuing their present tendency to its logical goal, end by going stark naked, there will be no more poets and painters, but only dermatologists."), but many of his sections (such as on the relations between men and women, quoted above) are embarrassingly outdated.

This isn't a difficult read in that it's dense, hard to follow, or challenging, but Mencken's style hasn't aged particularly well; he reads like an ancient hackle-raising columnist, which is exactly what he is at this point. One can certainly see why he was censured and denounced -- there's loads of inventive invective in here, but the actual ideas are usually pretty half-baked. Unfortunately, I like the idea of Mencken more than I like the reality -- taking potshots at America, American customs and peculiarities, and particular Americans sounds a lot more interesting in theory than what Henry Louis does in practice. I'd love to be proven wrong at some point, but after slogging through this lackluster anthology, I'd put that as unlikely.