Today's Narrowly Conceived African American Novel

Coake continuedfrom previous page best, most cutting humor is rooted in this sadness. While Hornby can't resist the occasional throwaway (JJ on the musical taste of the young and hip: "They don't like the Ramones or the Temptations or the 'Mats; they like DJ Bleepy and his stupid fucking bleeps"), his funniest lines are rooted in the darkest places. Here's Martin—whose bad decisions have cost him fame and family—taking to task a coroner's description of a man's suicide as an act of mental illness: I'd say [the suicide] got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take any more, and then it's off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback with a length ofrubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation ofthe fucking shambles it had become." I'm not arguing that A Long Way Down is perfect ; it isn't. Sometimes Hornby strains for plot. For instance: Martin and Jess are both, in the world ofthe novel, famous—when word of their botched suicide inevitably reaches the press, Jess tells reporters that an "angel" dissuaded them, and the otherthree characters agree. Whatis meant as satire veers too close to sitcom territory. And from time to time the characters' endless squabbling grows wearying; these are unpleasant , self-absorbed people, it's true, but we need little reminder. Yet these flaws are minor diversions along the way to the novel's small, honest discovery: that characters in despair, unpleasant as they are, might inspire in one another some measure of hope. I write this word with a jcertain embarrassment —afeeling worth parsing. No saneperson would dispute the world's need forhope, or that writing and reading are useful, lasting mechanisms for discovering it. But in contemporary fiction, such hope is often tricky to find, let alone carry home. Ours is a literature , after all, that privileges irresolution, ambiguity, "meanings" as numerous as readers. (Full disclosure: I am a writer ofjust this kind of fiction.) But to feel hope requires us to set these complexities aside, if only for a moment. It's an answer, after all—and shouldn't writers—as Chekov believed—"not try to solve such questions as those ofGod, pessimism, and so forth" but rather "state a problem correctly"? A Long Way Down is not so much a book about suicide as it is a book about whypeople might turn away from suicide. Never mind that Hornby, to my mind, does earn his hope, that his ending still contains artful ambiguity—my initial response to its presence is one of suspicion, and I don't think I'm alone in it. In fact, the more I read Hornby, the more I wonder if the resistance to him in higher critical circles isn't in fact due to his continued insistence on leaving us with optimism, as both a point of resolution and as a theme. Who else, among our serious writers, does this? The closest analogue I can find on my own shelves is Anne Tyler—and it's no surprise that she's not only viewed with occasional critical suspicion (though not by me), but that Hornby has named her as a major influence. My point, I hope, is obvious: Hornby is staking out literary territory that is very close to unique. And isn't this, in and of itself, artistic? Even, in its context, subversive? If we cringe at the mention of hope, isn't that our fault, and not Hornby's, for suggesting such a thing is possible—and doing so with such intelligence and humor? I can't—and won't—make the argument that Hornby is thus a kind ofcutting-edge post-postmodernist ; he would, I suspect, have little patience for such a notion. But he's not a middlebrow throwback, either, not with his insistence on chronicling pop-culture minutiae and the complexity of his characters' fractured psyches. Abook likeA Long Way Down is, then, perhaps best described as a hybrid: an easilyread , pleasurable, apprehensible portrait...