Suicide's Light Side

By Lev Grossman

If you were Nick Hornby's friend and he told you about a book he was working on called A Long Way Down (Riverhead; 333 pages), you would have gently taken him aside and encouraged him to consign it to that great literary recycling bin into which unwritable novels go. As a writer Hornby is one of the great welterweights--lots of comic flair, good with the voices and the pop culture, always ready with a dash of bittersweet pathos--but he's not generally thought of as swinging a heavy bat, intellectually speaking. There's a reason his books get turned into movies starring John Cusack (High Fidelity) and Hugh Grant (About a Boy) and not Sean Penn and Russell Crowe.

And A Long Way Down gets into some very heavy stuff indeed. It's about four strangers on New Year's Eve who meet on the roof of an apartment building where they have all come to kill themselves. It's a credit to Hornby's ambition and idiosyncratic world view that this idea struck him as suited to his gifts. "Immediately I could see that there would be an opportunity for comedy," he says by phone from London.

Oddly enough, he was right. The four would-be suicides are Martin, a disgraced talk-show host; JJ, a failed rock musician; Jess, a teenager who just got dumped by her boyfriend; and Maureen, a middle-aged shut-in with a severely disabled son. Momentarily distracted from self-destruction, the four get to comparing notes. (Maureen is immediately judged the top gun, misery-wise. "Oh, yeah," says Jess. "That's a no-brainer. Don't change your mind. You'd only regret it.") They decide to put off jumping and instead form a bickering, wary, ad hoc fellowship. It's like The Breakfast Club rewritten by Beckett.

Hornby is not unacquainted with misfortune. His parents split when he was 11, and he's divorced himself. Like Maureen, he has a disabled child; his son Danny is autistic. And although at 48 he's on a serious roll--the movie Fever Pitch is based on a memoir of his, and Johnny Depp just bought the rights to A Long Way Down--like JJ, Hornby knows the pain of a stalled career. "A lot of that is about remembering how frustrated and hopeless I felt when I was 30 and didn't think I'd ever be able to do what I wanted to do," Hornby says. "My first book was published when I was 35, so everything feels quite recent to me. The slow, poor, what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life part seemed to last quite a long time."

The pain feels real in A Long Way Down, although not at the price of Hornby's pleasantly bitter wit. But what makes the book work is Hornby's refusal to give an inch to sentimentality or cheap inspirational guff. "I didn't want a book where they loved each other," he says. "That seemed like a kind of bad, Hollywood way to go. They are frank with each other, but mostly so that they can abuse each other." Spoken like a true heavyweight. --By Lev Grossman