Subversive Hope

Aacrieai Review Theune continuedfrom previous page as Olena Kalytiak Davis and Geoffrey G. O'Brien to a "Further Reading" list at the end of the anthology , and it is simply unimaginable that there is no mention whatsoever of work by poets such as Gabriel Gudding, Chelsey Minnis, or Spenser Short, poets who have written some amazing poems, all very different from one another and yet situated squarely in the middle space. Such exclusion seems especially unconscionable considering that in their place, Shepherd selected the generally convoluted work of Jocelyn Emerson, Catherine Imbriglio, and Jenny Mueller, three poets that, one assumes, Shepherd knows personally, as they are thanked "for their comments, encouragement, and inspiration" at the end of his book, Otherhood (2003). Of course, it should be noted that in his introduction , Shepherd states, "I have chosen poets whose experiments most compel me." Fine, but it's not clear why their experiments are really new, or particularly American, or actually plural. Far from presenting new, American poetries, Shepherd has half-assembled and half-created a coterie, and, in doing so, he merely asserts a manner of writing already indicted and surpassed by so much of what it excludes. Michael Theune's poems, essays, and reviews have appearedin variouspublications, including The Iowa Review, Pleiades, and Verve. He is assistantprofessor ofEnglish at Illinois Wesleyan University. Subversive Hope Christopher Coake A Long Way Down Nick Hornby Riverhead http://www.riverheadbooks.com 333 pages; paper, $24.95 I often find myself having to defend Nick Hornby. Certainly, I'm not alone; Hornby is the sort of writer, after all, who inspires a protectiveness in his many fans that borders on the cultish. But what, exactly, am I defending him from? He's immensely popular, and, while critics have here and there taken his books to task, he's not yet released one to uniform disdain. Yet there's an insinuation in even the positive reviews that Hornby's work is, at best, a guilty pleasure; that, say, High Fidelity might see one through a long plane ride, but is not an intellectual event on par with the latest release by Amis, McEwan, etc. This saddens me; Hornby's writing in general—and his new novel, A Long Way Down, in particular—deserves considerable praise. In fact I want to make a case for Hornby as a serious writer, producing serious literature—it'sjust a shame I have to feel so furtive about it. I'll address this soon enough. But first, the work itself: A Long Way Down is at once typical of, and a departure from, Hornby's previous novels. Within it, a reader will find: characters who speak in a searching, complicated first person; an obsession with popular culture and its icons; an outrageous premise, which is then undercut by the characters' understanding ofits outrageousness; the presence of male ne'er-do-wells capable of tremendous obtuseness (and redemption); humor which derives from self-deprecation, if not outright depression; and a cautiously optimistic conclusion. While itnever quite adds up to something so crass as a formula, this is all Hornby's favored ground, first trodden—perhaps unsurprisingly—in his 1992 memoir Fever Pitch (in which the obtuse, self-deprecating male is none other than the author) and repeated, with the occasional variation, through High Fidelity (1996), About a Boy (1998), and How to Be Good (2001). ButA Long Way Down also finds Hornby seeking out new territory, technically and thematically. This time he employs four different narrators, all speaking—in rueful, selfdeprecating , often very funny first person—about a premise that, from a distance, could strike few novelists as a good idea: on a New Year's Eve, all four meet by accident on the roof of a London hotel called Toppers' House; all have gone there to jump to their deaths. Apart from their despair, the four narrators couldn't be more different. Martin is a disgraced, television personality who's just served time for sleeping with a minor. Maureen is a middle-aged lapsed Catholic caring for a son who's been braindamaged since birth. Jess is the teenaged daughter of a government official and an active force of chaos; she...