Life > August 31, 2006

By Caitlin Kenney

Staff writer

On the lonliest night of the year, four souls find their way to the top of an office building in downtown London with the intention of ending it.

Past mistakes, lost loves, crushed hopes, private desperation and possible insanity drives each to the edge. But when the jumpers find that they’re not alone, the four form a bond and become an unexpected sort of support group.

Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down isn’t really about suicide.

Rather, it’s about choosing to live, taking the long way down fifteen flights of stairs and finding a way to move past mistakes.

The group calls themselves the Topper’s House Four, so named for the building on which they meet one New Year’s Eve.

Composed of four completely different characters, the group has only one thing holding them together — the experience of nearly commiting suicide.

During the next few months, the group alternately attempts to work through their problems and to further complicate one another’s lives.

The rag-tag band, composed of an infamous and ruined talk-show host, a failed American musician, a middle-aged woman tied to her disabled son and a reckless, slightly imbalanced teen, use brutal honesty to explore their feelings and their reasons for jumping and not jumping.

Hornby’s fourth novel is certainly not your average story of redemption, but he tells the story with a frankness that makes his characters more relatable.

Each of Hornby’s jumpers is seriously depressed and he makes no bones about wanting to provide a happy ending.

The novel jumps from each character’s point of view, and though each of them hopes that talking to one another will bring some kind of closure, they learn more about themselves from their failed attempts to relate to one another.

The novel is alternatingly touching and spiteful, phyciotic and real, self-absorbed and spiritual.

Reading about four clinically depressed people may not sound too appealing, but the novel touches places that everyone has been and in the end you can’t help but relate to Hornby’s characters.

As one character says, “I’m telling you that people who get by aren’t so far away from being suicidal.”

If anything, it’s probably a good idea to read the novel now before someone buys the movie rights.

Nick Hornby novels, like High Fidelity and About a Boy, tend to transfer to the silver screen fairly quickly, so getting the novel under your belt will only put you ahead of the game.