Hornby sacrifices the witty edge of the pop-culture references and enthusiasm about music found in his earlier novels for a more realistic young skateboarder’s voice in Slam.

This and another similar dream also predict much of Sam’s story in a curiously supernatural manner, and the ending of the book resolves these dreams and the story with its own satisfying twist. Soon afterward, a prophetic dream leads Sam to escape to a seaside town, a plan which only delays the inevitable ‘fessing up to the parents that the dream predicted. I didn’t want the future to come, and what Alicia was about to say was the future.īoth Sam’s anticipation building up to this moment as well as the scene’s revealing look at the narrator’s thought process make it one of Hornby’s most shining moments. I was just putting off the moment, hanging onto the old Sam.

I wasn’t trying to be funny, and I wasn’t being thick. I understood straightaway what she meant. The boy-meets-girl part of the story moves quite quickly-the awkward meeting between Sam and Alicia appears merely 50 pages away from her telling him about her being “late.” This last scene in particular provides a striking example of the novel’s calculated intensity: When he arrives to the bullet-point item of meeting Alicia, the narrative launches into more gripping moments of Sam’s life. Would Alicia make those noises? Could I ask her not to?” Later on in the novel, Sam’s lists often contain a nugget or two of the narrator’s thoughtful concern about his family or girlfriend, Alicia: “I’d seen a baby being born on TV, and it was terrible. Sam’s tendency to make lists also seems forced at first, especially since it parallels the obsessive amount of top 5 lists by music snob Rob Fleming, the narrator of High Fidelity. The young narrator then moves on to explain every item of his list in detail, creating an incessant back-peddling that lends itself to a clunky exposition, as seen in the repetition of phrases such as “The whole point of this story doesn’t happen for a little while.” The story begins with a list of why life was going so well for Sam. Sam’s voice does seem a bit turbulent in the first few dozen pages or so. The celebrated author of the male confessional launches into his first young adult novel through Sam’s voice, allowing Hornby to pull off, with relative ease, the reflective but stunted language of the man-child protagonists who fly off the pages of his earlier bestsellers High Fidelity and About a Boy. That’s what 16-year-old Sam does in Slam, the latest novel by Nick Hornby. Who do you turn to for advice? Why, the infinite wisdom of Tony Hawk, of course. Let’s say you were a teenager who got his girlfriend pregnant.

Book review slam nick hornby