#A long way down book summary trial#
#A long way down book summary tv#

#A long way down book summary trial#

The 'rubbish-strewn teenage bedroom of Jess's mind' can be laugh-out-loud funny, and both Martin's celebrity-fluffed ego and Jess's disinhibted obscenities make for addictively amusing car-crash reading as the gang agrees to a trial survival period before a Valentine's day crisis meeting.Д«y setting up the towering challenge of putting four depressed characters on a rooftop and sustaining their subsequent momentum, any writer will almost inevitably paint themselves into a corner. What follows is a cynical appraisal of the fixations and disposable nature of contemporary culture, and this is where Hornby is at his best as he pins down the age in which we live with precision and comic brilliance. Jess's former one-night stand sells the story of the attempted suicide to a tabloid, and the group has a few larks winding up the press with tales of a rooftop sighting of a redemptive angel resembling Matt Damon. As Maureen says of Jess: 'It was like the whole how's-your-father on the roof was like a minor accident, the sort of thing where you rub your head and sit down and have a cup of sweet tea, and then you get on with the rest of your day.' Hornby can do searing social commentary and feel-good humour as well as ever, but initially there's an emotional component missing: comic effect is achieved at the expense of psychological veracity, and even if this is a stylised fictional approach to self-destruction, we do need to empathise with these losers through the screen of their gallows humour. Though later enlightened about their own levels of despair, they're at best a squealing bunch of parasuicides, and their rooftop farce and its ramifications becomes slapstick, all one-liners and wobbly furniture, with barely a glimmer of the mental pain required to underpin the decision to top themselves. The problem here is that these people are meant to be suicidal. JJ is a slightly straining-to-be-American American, and Maureen is a heart-rending misfit with only a chronically disabled son for company. To Jess, a decidedly troubled Labour minister's daughter, life is like totally shit but some stuff is really really lush, right.

#A long way down book summary tv#

As a breakfast TV star sacked in the wake of a sex scandal and now resident in the tabloids, Martin's cocky articulacy works best in contrast with the Young Person logorrhoea of Jess. This is a chapterless three-acter in which four protagonists tell their tales in their own distinctive styles. Their half-hearted group exploits carry them through the rest of the novel. Our foursome - a disgraced former TV presenter, a downtrodden middle-aged mum, a foul-mouthed teen rebel and a solipsistic muso - then marry their destinies, squabble, and jet off on holiday together. After a bit of wire-cutting and pavement-gazing, the quartet exchange some end-of-the-line dialogue, then descend as one via the stairs with barely a whimper to search for a teenager's former boyfriend at a party.

They're about to fling themselves to their deaths, but they encounter each other instead and form a comically ill-matched alliance.

Four characters are placed upon a tower block roof on New Year's Eve.