Music and Middle Class Guilt (High Fidelity - Nick Hornby)

Member Name: Ian Proudfoot

Product:	High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
Date:	09/04/02 (480 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Paper can be recycled, I didn't buy it

Disadvantages: No connection to characters, Smug, Boring

Welcome to the world of Nick Hornby , a world in which men are in a permanent state of arrested development, trapped by their childish addictions as the rest of the world apparently leaves them by. A world full of middle class guilt and angst, where the failure to achieve respectability and a 'normal' life are paramount to the tale being told. Welcome to the world of the most insidious and painful book I've read in a long time.

Hornby basically is a one story man, just like Steven King. Where as King's novels always deal with a writer becoming involved in the centre of some supernatural occurrence, Hornby's are centred around a thirty something man going through a crisis of having to deal with the real world. With Fever Pitch the focus was the world of Arsenal and football, with High Fidelity it's the world of music and a independently run record store. However at the heart of both stories is the misadventures of a man to deal with emotional relationships to his girlfriend(s) and those around him.

High Fidelity begins with Rob the main character/ narrator wallowing through a list of previous girlfriends. If Hornby was trying to create a sympathetic relationship between the reader and Rob, he fails immediately. Instead of feeling sorry for Rob, I just felt loathing for a character that is instantly dislikeable because of his backwards looking and negative nature. As Hornby tries to build the character more by introducing the music store and his colleagues and so called friends, my despair just increased.

The problem is that Rob, is so immensely pathetic and anally retentive about everything in his even the twitching pathos you initially feel for his dull existence vanishes in a puff of smoke. The thing is instead of creating a character that is tragically repressed and depressed all Hornby creates a character in Rob who is John Major grey in his persona. He's a loser, his male friends are losers and Hornby fail
s to make you care one iota about them.

The next big problem with High Fidelity is that the underlying story is a dull cliché no matter how much Hornby tries to dress it up with 'cool' cultural references. No matter how many iconic gestures to the Q reader friendly music that Hornby drops into High Fidelity he can't hide the fact that it really is an unispiringly simple love story. A classic tale of man loses women, gets depressed and wallows, eventually gets back with said women followed by the obliquatory happy ending.

If the work of Will Self is the cauterised veins of the interchanges of the M25 then Hornby work is the straight line driving of the M40. An unchallenging journey through uninteresting landscape.

Why Hornby's novels are so popular is beyond me after reading High Fidelity. Sure he can write in a clear and well manicured style, but there is no real passion or invention in his writing. Maybe I don't attach myself to the whole middle class guilt trip that Hornby seems to champion. All I see is someone writing a book about an uninteresting life and selling it to and audience who live the same uninteresting and uneventful lives.

High Fidelity in a list of dreary reading would be number five in a list of books, where the first four are instruction manuals for Ikea furniture. In a list of dull music related writings, it would be up there with the collected thoughts of Atomic Kitten and Savage Garden.

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