No one's ever very happy at the beginning of a Nick Hornby novel, but the four characters we meet in A Long Way Down are having a particularly rough time of it. Martin was a morning TV host until a sex scandal cost him his job; Maureen is a single mother who's spent her life caring for her severely disabled son; Jess doesn't get much attention from her parents, who are still coping with the unexplained disappearance of her older sister; and JJ -- the American in the group -- has come to the realization that he's never going to be a rock star. And so, on New Year's Eve, each of them makes their way to the roof of Toppers' House in London, a roof notorious as a jumping-off ground for the suicidal.
The first third of the novel -- the New Year's Eve/morning that the four spend together -- is the best part of the book, but the rest, in which the four continue to meet periodically, having decided to form a sort of ad hoc support group, is awfully gooey and maudlin. Everyone realizes that their problems aren't so bad and everyone learns that Life Is Worth Living and oh my god how many times have we read this story before?
The biggest problem with the book is that, like most of Hornby's characters, these four are all terribly clever and witty; that tone doesn't always mix well with them being supposedly so depressed that they're ready to kill themselves. Maybe depression and sparkling repartee really do go together in real life, but it doesn't feel terribly convincing here.
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