A Long Way Down -- Nick Hornby

The Breakfast Club – (revisited 20 yrs on)

I’m too old to put up with the angst and yammering of youth’s hard slog up the hill of adulthood. I can take a few hours of this whining, but I would have much preferred a 90-minute Hollywood version.

The Breakfast Club (1985) was successfully targeted on 14-year olds. It quickly became an adolescent classic like my generation’s James Dean flic, “Rebel Without a Cause” 30 years before.

“Way Down” takes a similar four losers from the Breakfast Club; ages them fifteen years; and places them on top of a building, each with a perfectly rational and expedient solution to their dysfunctional lives – jump off.!! Unfortunately, they fail. What could have turned out to be a great population control idea, through a strategy of weeding out the weak, instead turned into a paper wastage machine for the author.

Yes, I think success spoiled Nick Hornby. Then again, maybe he only had the one book in him. He’s certainly been writing the same story over and over again. This idea, of the four on a building, could have been an interesting short story, or a stage play, or a screenplay without the precedent book. However, Hornby seems to be locked on the 300-page novel format. This particular effort was a cheap, gimmicky shortcut – four, otherwise unrelated mini-stories, wrapped into one “novel.”.

Now I grant you that British humour plays a lot on human foibles, mistakes, and downright stupidity; and I do love my “Red Dwarf” and “Absolutely Fabulous”. However, these four idiots would be lucky to average an IQ of 65. Then again, I have to admit how idiotic it is for so many “bright” men to be caught with their pants down so often. Nonetheless, this book didn’t pass test number one of fiction, suspension of disbelief. And without that, who gives two cents about the miserable, depressing lives of a quartet of wankers in England.