Book Reviews, Young Adult

Slam ~Nick Hornby

16 Comments

Slam ~Nick Hornby

–published 2007
–G.P. Putnam’s Sons
–309 pages

I ‘met’ Nick Hornby last year, and spent a considerably short amount of time delving into the his thoughts about books that he read (The Pollysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt and Shakespeare Wrote For Money…click each title for review), and I read about half of his thoughts on soccer (Fever Pitch) but had not tried his fiction. My friend Jeff listened to this on audio awhile back and told me how entertaining, and horrifying, it was and when I ran across it in the library the other day I decided it was high time I gave it a try.

Jeff was dead on. It is entertaining. Highly entertaining. And if you are a parent, or plan to be a parent, it is horrifying. Very horrifying.

Our narrator is Sam, an eighteen-year-old young man who is relating the events of the past two years of his life, when his soon-to-be-sixteen-year-old self found himself in a situation where history repeated itself: he was a ‘mistake’ which happened to his mother when she was his same age.

Sam is good at art, is a fair skater (skateboarder), and gets most of his advice from conversations he has with TH, Tony Hawk, or rather a poster of Tony Hawk.

Hornby imbues his young protagonist with an earnest, honest voice that quickly takes you back to when you were that same age. Sam is an entertaining narrator, yet one who has had the pain of growing up more quickly than perhaps he should have had to were he to have made different choices.

While I say the book is “horrifying”, I in no way mean to imply anything about those who have experienced unplanned pregnancies in their teenage years. It happens. But as a parent, particularly one of a 17 year old girl, Slam brings home just how difficult life can be sometimes, and makes me hope that no matter what happens to my child as she continues to mature, that I’ll be able to handle good or bad in a loving, mature manner.

Lest you think I’ve given something away and that you now have no reason to read this book, please understand that I have not. It is pretty obvious from the very beginning what the major event in the book is about. What I haven’t told you is the part of the book that you need to discover for yourself: how great Nick Hornby is at telling a tender and tragic and funny and triumphant story. Hornby is no stranger to the silver screen, with his books being turned into films (Hi Fidelity, About a Boy, Fever Pitch) and his Oscar-nominated work on the screenplay for An Education. Slam skips along at the kind of pace that makes me think it would work well as a feature film too.

Hornby tackles some very serious subject matter here but does so in a way that is not judgmental, nor does it encourage irresponsible behavior. It looks at the world through the remembrances of a boy who is still just that, a boy. I picked up Slam yesterday afternoon and quickly finished it today. Once I got started I just didn’t want to put it down. The 300 pages flew by. I will certainly be sampling more of Nick Horby’s fiction in the future, while I (im)patiently wait for his next collection of book-related essays.
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This book is a selection for the

2010 Support Your Local Library Challenge

and the

2010 Reading Challenge in the Young Adult category.

16 thoughts on “Slam ~Nick Hornby”

  1. I”m kind of scared of Nick Hornby, though I do have About a Boy on my shelf waiting for me. I’m not sure why he intimidates me, but he does.

  2. Amanda: I know the feeling, there are plenty of authors who intimidate me as well. I can definitely say that this book would not be intimidating for you at all and might be a nice introduction to his adult fiction. I haven’t read any of that yet myself.

  3. This sounds great! My husband loves Nick Hornby but we haven’t picked this one up yet. I want to read his books too!

  5. In an over-thirty-year career as a social worker, social work supervisor, manager and administrator, one of the saddest things I saw, over and over, was children having children. Girls completely unprepared for motherhood suddenly with a baby in their arms and lives, which then would never be the same and the years they would have, could have matured and experienced the world around them were instead spent, usually at the cost of the rest of their education, trying to manage parenting with all it’s demands, trials and expenses. Alienation from parents and isolation from peers was often part of the story.

    I have a feeling that, no matter how good a writer Hornby is, this is one I’ve lived enough of, enough times, that I’ll not put this on my list of books to try.

    Thanks very much for the excellent review. I hope many young people read this, your daughter and all her friends included, and perhaps will be better prepared to say “no” when the time comes, and later on, yes when it’s the right time to start a family.

  6. Richard: If you told me you had been a social worker (which you probably had) please forgive me for not remembering. Being a social work administrator myself, I had really wondered if I would like this one. It ended up being written in such a way that I did enjoy it, despite how painful/frustrating the subject matter is. I can certainly understand why you and others would choose not to read it though, particularly for entertainment. If de Lint wasn’t such a great writer I’m not sure I could read his stories for entertainment either, but because he is I actually end up taking something out of it to add to my work.

    I didn’t know going through it originally if I thought it was going to work for a young person as a wake up call, but because it isn’t an ‘in your face’, judgmental view on teen pregnancy, I do think it actually works as a good conversation piece between parents and their teens. I thought it was interesting that he used the mother character in the book to show just some of what you talk about with how teen pregnancy has long term effects.

  8. Nick Hornby is one author I always feel that I’d like but haven’t yet read his book. I’ve enjoyed the films based on his books and I’ve read one or two of his articles and he seems very entertaining.

  9. I also became a Hornby fan last year by reading his essay collections from The Believer magazines. Slam then was my first foray into his fiction. I listened to a well done audiobook of it a year ago now. To be truly honest it is one of those books I’ve returned to many times in my thoughts over the past year. It really struck a cord with me since I have a teenager daughter now, 13.

    I’m still amazed how well Hornby found the “voice” of both a teenage boy and girl and made them sooooo believable.

    It is a wonderful book and at the same time I found it scary as I thought of my own kinds and the same choices the book main characters face and make my kids will be making in the not to distant future. I also as a parent probably focused more on the negative consequences of those choices. Hornby though continually amazed me in this book by letting me look in these characters heads in ways I hadn’t thought of from a modern teenager perspective. He gave me lots of food for thought.

    As for if I’m ready to hand this book to my kids when they turn 14 or 15 I’m still not so sure. Maybe there in lies the answer itself and I should. This book does a great job of laying out the issues and I don’t feel judges the choices made. The author I felt didn’t have a heavy handed agenda he was trying to shove down my throat. Instead I applaud him on I think giving me another way to look at and talk with my kids about such a life altering decisions. Thanks Nick!

  10. Jeff: It certainly is an interesting conundrum about whether or not one should suggest that their teenage children read this. I do think if a parent wanted to couple it with some good dialogue on choices and how they affect us it would be an ideal book to do so with because it is not, as you say, heavy handed. It doesn’t paint everything in such a negative light that all teenage pregnancies are horrible, never-reparable situations, nor does it make it sound like it is a fun thing to have happen. It is much more ‘real’, if that makes sense.

    And you are right, he did a great job of capturing teenage voices of both sexes, as well as the voices of the parents.

    I also really liked that the book had some fantasy elements to it, with the whole Tony Hawk storyline which not only made the story more interesting as a story but also opened up the plot for things to be looked at in many different ways.

    Fence: I do think you’d like Hornby, although I would probably recommend starting with the nonfiction just because I am such a big fan of that.

    Richard: We are indeed. I got my degree in Social Work and have been in the field for 20 years. I’ve went from on the ground case work to now being in a director position over multiple programs. I have no doubt that you would know exactly what I meant if I said that I was having a rough day! 🙂 Thankfully today has been a good Monday.

  11. My route exactly, except when I started there were NO openings so I took a clerical position for about 6 months before getting to the caseworker level, then the same route you went through. At the end I was Administrator for the Food Stamp and Medi-Cal programs in this county. The law changes and meetings alone are killers.

  12. I know what you mean, Richard. My job title would be more accurate if it was “Professional Meeting Attender”.

  13. I’ve read some of his fiction but hadn’t read his essays until this year – I finally read the Polysyllabic Spree, which I just loved! Glad to hear you really enjoyed this one and if I can make a suggestion check out High Fidelity. So good.

  14. Iliana: I do plan on reading High Fidelity at some point. I actually did check it out last year when I was in the middle of a Hornby spree, but didn’t get around to it. Soon! The other two essay collections are just as fun as Polysyllabic Spree.

  15. This is one of those books I own and keep shuffling to the top of the to-read stack and then watch it keep slipping back down again as other books catch my attention. I will get around to reading it though, just not sure when! 😉

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