A review of Slam by Nick Hornby

Let’s say you were a teenager who got his girlfriend pregnant. Who do you turn to for advice? Why, the infinite wisdom of Tony Hawk, of course. That’s what 16-year-old Sam does in Slam, the latest novel by Nick Hornby. 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.

Sam’s voice does seem a bit turbulent in the first few dozen pages or so. The story begins with a list of why life was going so well for Sam. 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.”

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. 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. Would Alicia make those noises? Could I ask her not to?”

When he arrives to the bullet-point item of meeting Alicia, the narrative launches into more gripping moments of Sam’s life. 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:

“Hello,” I said.
“Happy birthday,” she said. And then “I’m late.”
I understood straightaway what she meant.
“You were here before me, even,” I said. I couldn’t resist it. I wasn’t trying to be funny, and I wasn’t being thick. I was just putting off the moment, hanging onto the old Sam. I didn’t want the future to come, and what Alicia was about to say was the future.

Both 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.

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. 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.

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. Despite his limitations, Hornby still manages to weave in pop-culture references. For instance, it is no coincidence that much of the novel focuses on Sam’s reliance on Tony Hawk’s autobiography, having read it “forty or fifty times” in the past.

The character’s language slips into beautiful and astute observation at some points, such as when Sam describes a song:

She put on some sad, slow music that made my watch seem to stop. It was a woman singing about someone who had left her and she was remembering all these things about him like his smell and his shoes and what he had in his jacket pockets if you put your hand in there. There wasn’t anything she didn’t remember, it sounded like and the song lasted forever.

Slam also contains the vivid dialogue between characters that brings Hornby’s characters to life and make his stories so easily adaptable to film. In one particularly hilarious dialogue, Sam finds nothing but frustration when talking with his skateboarding buddy, named Rubbish, after word got around about Alicia’s pregnancy:

“You’re screwed, aren’t you?”
“Thanks.”
“Sorry. But you are.”
“Thanks again,”
“Sorry. But—”
“You weren’t going to tell me I’m screwed for a third time, were you?”

Even if Slam does not make it to big screen, it proves Hornby’s versatility as a writer, which comes to life even as he limits himself to his newly found underaged readership.