Slam by Nick Hornby
Jun. 24th, 2008 12:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
"There was this time when everything seemed to have come together. And so obviously it was time to go and screw it all up."
Sam is sixteen and a skater. Just so there are no terrible misunderstandings: skating = skateboarding. There's no ice. Life is ticking along nicely for Same: his mum's got rid of her rubbish boyfriend, he's thinking about college and he's met someone. Alicia.
Then a little accident happens. One with big consequences for someone just finding his way in life. Sam can't run (let alone skate) away from this one. He's a boy facing a man's problems and the question is - has he got what it takes to confront them?
In his first book aimed at the YA audience, I really expected a lot more from a writer as talented as Nick Hornby. Although the subject of teen pregnancy has been done to death, there isn't a great deal out there that looks at it from the father-to-be's angle and it seemed to me that there was a great deal of synergy here with that perennial Hornby theme of men (or in this case, teenage boys) finally being forced to take responsibility and start displaying some maturity. A writer of Hornby's talent could write a book about that in his sleep. Unfortunately, it seems that he did.
Sam has a stereotypical background (raised by a single mother who had him whilst herself a teenager and emotionally distant from his father). Although the central character device of having him talk about his problems to a Tony Hawk poster reminded me a little too much of BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM's similar device, Hornby has clearly done some research into skater terminology and slang and I found Sam's relationship with his friends to be fairly believable.
Where the book falls down though is the fact that Hornby wants Sam to be a bit of everything. He's an inarticulate boy who is unable to voice his inner feelings but at the same time he needs to be perceptive as to the emotions of those around him and explain them. It's a tension that does not come off. Then there's his relationship with middle-class Alicia. To be honest, I didn't ever really see what she saw in him other than that he was convenient and a way of thumbing her nose at her parents. Certainly, she seems somewhat two-dimensional on the page (all we learn of her is that she wants to be a model and is a little arrogant) and it's disappointing that Hornby avoids having any discussion of her aborting the baby as this could have led to some interesting emotional development on both her and Sam's part.
I also had big issues with Hornby's time-travel device. To begin with, he hedges on whether Sam is actually being zapped forward in time, which makes it very difficult to suspend disbelief in these scenes and whilst it's obvious that he's using them to move the story forward, the fact that we later have Sam reliving them (albeit slightly differently) makes them too repetitive. Hornby makes a big deal of Sam's wanting to be a good dad to his son, but it's something that comes too late in the text for it to have the emotional impact it needs.
There's a very cliche feel to the events in the book, with Sam going through the checklist of running away from his problems, to reluctantly confronting them, to embracing them and having everything turn out all right in the end. That makes for dull reading and whilst Hornby throws in a few funny lines, it isn't enough to salvage what is a very blah novel, with nothing innovative to say on the subject.
The Verdict:
A surprisingly cliche and poor offering from a very talented writer. Not something that I'd recommend to teenagers or adults.
Sam is sixteen and a skater. Just so there are no terrible misunderstandings: skating = skateboarding. There's no ice. Life is ticking along nicely for Same: his mum's got rid of her rubbish boyfriend, he's thinking about college and he's met someone. Alicia.
Then a little accident happens. One with big consequences for someone just finding his way in life. Sam can't run (let alone skate) away from this one. He's a boy facing a man's problems and the question is - has he got what it takes to confront them?
In his first book aimed at the YA audience, I really expected a lot more from a writer as talented as Nick Hornby. Although the subject of teen pregnancy has been done to death, there isn't a great deal out there that looks at it from the father-to-be's angle and it seemed to me that there was a great deal of synergy here with that perennial Hornby theme of men (or in this case, teenage boys) finally being forced to take responsibility and start displaying some maturity. A writer of Hornby's talent could write a book about that in his sleep. Unfortunately, it seems that he did.
Sam has a stereotypical background (raised by a single mother who had him whilst herself a teenager and emotionally distant from his father). Although the central character device of having him talk about his problems to a Tony Hawk poster reminded me a little too much of BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM's similar device, Hornby has clearly done some research into skater terminology and slang and I found Sam's relationship with his friends to be fairly believable.
Where the book falls down though is the fact that Hornby wants Sam to be a bit of everything. He's an inarticulate boy who is unable to voice his inner feelings but at the same time he needs to be perceptive as to the emotions of those around him and explain them. It's a tension that does not come off. Then there's his relationship with middle-class Alicia. To be honest, I didn't ever really see what she saw in him other than that he was convenient and a way of thumbing her nose at her parents. Certainly, she seems somewhat two-dimensional on the page (all we learn of her is that she wants to be a model and is a little arrogant) and it's disappointing that Hornby avoids having any discussion of her aborting the baby as this could have led to some interesting emotional development on both her and Sam's part.
I also had big issues with Hornby's time-travel device. To begin with, he hedges on whether Sam is actually being zapped forward in time, which makes it very difficult to suspend disbelief in these scenes and whilst it's obvious that he's using them to move the story forward, the fact that we later have Sam reliving them (albeit slightly differently) makes them too repetitive. Hornby makes a big deal of Sam's wanting to be a good dad to his son, but it's something that comes too late in the text for it to have the emotional impact it needs.
There's a very cliche feel to the events in the book, with Sam going through the checklist of running away from his problems, to reluctantly confronting them, to embracing them and having everything turn out all right in the end. That makes for dull reading and whilst Hornby throws in a few funny lines, it isn't enough to salvage what is a very blah novel, with nothing innovative to say on the subject.
The Verdict:
A surprisingly cliche and poor offering from a very talented writer. Not something that I'd recommend to teenagers or adults.
