BOOKS

A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby
288pp, Viking, £17.99



Nick Hornby has grown up in public. Lad lit's original gang leader has written about football, music, parental responsibility and morality, his work organically evolving with maturity. This time, however, he's plumped for the subject of failed suicide.
Four characters are placed upon a tower block roof on New Year's Eve. They're about to fling themselves to their deaths, but they encounter each other instead and form a comically ill-matched alliance. After a bit of wire-cutting and pavement-gazing, the quartet exchange some end-of-the-line dialogue, then descend as one via the stairs with barely a whimper to search for a teenager's former boyfriend at a party. Not very likely, really, is it?

Our foursome - a disgraced former TV presenter, a downtrodden middle-aged mum, a foul-mouthed teen rebel and a solipsistic muso - then marry their destinies, squabble, and jet off on holiday together. Their half-hearted group exploits carry them through the rest of the novel. This is a chapterless three-acter in which four protagonists tell their tales in their own distinctive styles. As a breakfast TV star sacked in the wake of a sex scandal and now resident in the tabloids, Martin's cocky articulacy works best in contrast with the Young Person logorrhoea of Jess. To Jess, a decidedly troubled Labour minister's daughter, life is like totally shit but some stuff is really really lush, right. JJ is a slightly straining-to-be-American American, and Maureen is a heart-rending misfit with only a chronically disabled son for company.

The problem here is that these people are meant to be suicidal. Though later enlightened about their own levels of despair, they're at best a squealing bunch of parasuicides, and their rooftop farce and its ramifications becomes slapstick, all one-liners and wobbly furniture, with barely a glimmer of the mental pain required to underpin the decision to top themselves. Hornby can do searing social commentary and feel-good humour as well as ever, but initially there's an emotional component missing: comic effect is achieved at the expense of psychological veracity, and even if this is a stylised fictional approach to self-destruction, we do need to empathise with these losers through the screen of their gallows humour. As Maureen says of Jess: "It was like the whole how's-your-father on the roof was like a minor accident, the sort of thing where you rub your head and sit down and have a cup of sweet tea, and then you get on with the rest of your day."

Jess's former one-night stand sells the story of the attempted suicide to a tabloid, and the group has a few larks winding up the press with tales of a rooftop sighting of a redemptive angel resembling Matt Damon. What follows is a cynical appraisal of the fixations and disposable nature of contemporary culture, and this is where Hornby is at his best as he pins down the age in which we live with precision and comic brilliance. The "rubbish-strewn teenage bedroom of Jess's mind" can be laugh-out-loud funny, and both Martin's celebrity-fluffed ego and Jess's disinhibted obscenities make for addictively amusing car-crash reading as the gang agrees to a trial survival period before a Valentine's day crisis meeting.

By setting up the towering challenge of putting four depressed characters on a rooftop and sustaining their subsequent momentum, any writer will almost inevitably paint themselves into a corner. This is a high-concept theme stretched to breaking point: the film's drama-packed opening sequence is assured, but what can possibly follow without bathos? The novel spends much of its time disentangling itself from its own artificial constraints, but when the characters essentially shake off their suicidal bond and get on with their haphazard lives, the narrative blooms and the voices relax until they are truly funny, daring and affecting.

When the emotional wreckage of the past is glimpsed the plot truly thickens, and over a third of the way in Hornby finally gets into his stride. His chummy everyman confessionals become sharper and meaner, and a limping narrative breaks into a gallop. The protagonists attempt to help each other, grandly messing it up, but each reaches a fumbling form of resolution. This is a transcendent ending that entirely avoids mawkishness or touchy-feely epiphany, but convinces and inspires instead. A Long Way Down is a good novel struggling to find a way out of the limitations of its own gimmick, but ultimately the conceit is so off-beam that one can almost ignore it and flow with the farce. This is an enjoyably readable, bumpy ride of a book, paradoxically both dangerously contrived and genuinely moving. - from The Guardian

Read the first chapter here.

MIX TAPES
by Thurston Moore (Artist and musician Thurston Moore looks back at the plastic gadget that first let us make our own compilations.)

The first time I ever heard of someone making a mix tape was in 1978. Robert Christgau, the "dean of rock critics," was writing in The Village Voice about his favorite Clash record, which just happened to be the one he made himself: a tape of all the band's non-LP B-sides. One aspect really struck me - Christgau said it was a tape he made to give to friends. He had made his own personalized Clash record and was handing it out as a memento of his rock-and-roll devotion.

In those days, tape decks were as essential as turntables and just as bulky. But then Sony came out with the Walkman. I suppose the record industry expected consumers to buy cassettes of the LPs, and some surely did, but hey - why not just buy blank cassettes and record tracks from LPs instead? Of course, this is what every Walkman user did, and before long there were warning stickers on records and cassettes, stating: home taping is killing music! It was a quaint forebear of today's industry paranoia over downloading and CD burning.

Around 1980, there was a spontaneous scene of young bands recording singles of superfast hardcore punk - Minor Threat, Negative Approach, Necros, Battalion of Saints, Adolescents, Sin 34, the Meatmen, Urban Waste, Void, Crucifucks, Youth Brigade, the Mob, Gang Green. I was fanatical and bought them all as soon as they came out. I was just a dishwasher at a SoHo restaurant - not exactly raking in the dough - but I needed these sides!

I also needed to hear these records in a more time-fluid way, and it hit me that I could make a mix tape of all the best songs. So I made what I thought was the most killer hardcore tape ever. I wrote H on one side, and C on the other. That night, after my love Kim had fallen asleep, I put the tape in our stereo cassette player, dragged one of the little speakers over to the bed, and listened to it at ultralow thrash volume. I was in a state of humming bliss. This music had every cell and fiber in my body on heavy sizzle mode. It was sweet.

On a Sonic Youth tour in the mid-'80s, we decided to get a cassette player for the van. One idea was to install a dashboard unit, but that was pricey. There was a street trend in NYC of hip hop heads blasting rap mix tapes through massive boom boxes, or "ghetto blasters." So I went into this Delancey Street store and, using the band's limited funds, bought the biggest boom box on display: a Conion that took 16 D batteries. The Conion - we nicknamed it "the Conan" - was almost like an extra body, about the size of a small kid. My solution was to stand it on end between the two front seats, facing the back. As we drove through the Holland Tunnel and began to distance ourselves from the city, I jammed in the first of the rap compilations I'd made, and the boom box sounded superb. We had it onstage with us when we played, and I miked it through the PA for between-song tape action. Kids gave us cassettes all across the US - some of them hopeful demos and some mix tapes, and we'd jam them all. By tour's end, there must have been hundreds of tapes strewn about the van, with their plastic cases stomped and cracked.

These days, CD technology has displaced the cassette in the mainstream, and mix CDs have become the new cultural love letter/trading post. For those of us who think that digital delivers a harsher sound than analog, it's a sonic nightmare dealing with the new world reality of MP3s. They're even more compressed and harsh than CDs, and in the case of vintage grooves - be it Led Zeppelin, Bad Brains, or Pavement - sound even more detached from musical vibration.

But even if MP3 music sounds lame, as long as it's recognizable in form, free, and shareable, it's here to stay. It will get better as more sophisticated methods of replication emerge. For now, its clunk is glamorized by celebrity iTunes playlists. ITunes has become the Hallmark card of mix tapes - all you gotta do is sign your name to personalize it.

Once again, we're being told that home taping (in the form of ripping and burning) is killing music. But it's not: It simply exists as a nod to the true love and ego involved in sharing music with friends and lovers. Trying to control music sharing - by shutting down P2P sites or MP3 blogs or BitTorrent or whatever other technology comes along - is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it.



Is homework worth it? Maybe kids who fire up video games when they come home from school will end up just as smart.