A Long Way Down

By Nick Hornby.

If you've ever considered suicide, read this. It's that simple.

The premise is that it's New Year's Eve, and Toppers' House is a London building famous for the number of people who have jumped off it. They've installed some fencing and the like, but an enterprising fellow can bring his own ladder. Just as Martin Sharp's getting up the nerve, he gets a tap on the back from Maureen, wanting to know if she can borrow his ladder, y'know, after he's done using it. Then here comes Jess Crichton, barreling into the both of them to the point where they both end up sitting on her. Then JJ comes up on the roof with the pizzas he came to deliver.

When four people show up at the same time to jump off a building, it kind of throws everyone off their nerve. So instead they go to look for Jess's schmucky ex she came to find. And then they get spotted in the media because Martin used to be a famous breakfast television star. And then Jess gets the bright idea to claim they all saw an angel so they can make some money. And one way or another they kind of form a club/gang to try to get through life, or at least the ninety days of crisis period before someone changes their mind on that particular issue.

Everyone's got their reasons:

• Martin was a breakfast television star who cheated on his wife...and it turned out the girl was fifteen. He did three months of jail time, his wife left him and won't let him see the kids, and he's ruined his life forever. What else is there to do?
• Maureen had sex once, got pregnant, got abandoned, and then her child turned out to be a complete vegetable. She basically hasn't been able to leave the house much in nineteen years. She's sick of her life as is, but what can you do as long as your child lives on?
• Jess is a screwed-up 18-year-old whose sister disappeared, presumably after committing suicide via ocean. Jess is incredibly annoying and at the start of the book, stalking her ex.
• JJ the pizza guy is all broken up because he lost his girl and his band, and compared to everyone else, claims he's dying of a made-up condition so he doesn't sound so ridiculous.  (He gets over that.)

Anyway, this incredibly motley crew that doesn't have much in common besides wanting to die try to stick together, through book and music clubs, through a vacation trip, through a return to the scene of their crime and seeing someone else in the same situation, and through trying to figure out if there's anything any of them can do to help each other.

This is a very, very realistic book in a lot of respects.* There's not exactly a lot of hugging and learning. Martin is an asshole and knows it and regrets it but can't seem to figure out how to not be an asshole for the most part. Jess is incredibly annoying to everyone and immature as fuck, but in her own way just trying to figure out how to help. JJ amd Maureen are the more sympathetic folks. Maureen's a nice enough lady who got utterly screwed by life and what the hell can you do about it? As for JJ, he somewhat seems more together for a guy working menial jobs, but it's killing him to not be a successful musician. 

• Though I was amazed that Martin could get ANY job at all first and still had an agent and still had money, though he eventually runs out of that. I guess they used their angel TV money to go on vacation?

There's a lot of acerbicness and jerky behavior and yet caring. I enjoyed JJ's conversation with Maureen about what she'd ask of "Cosmic Tony" if there was some magical man who could grant wishes.  Jess in particular (of all people) really gets into the idea of trying to figure out how to improve everyone's lives, even if, well, there's issues with that.

"We weren't just sitting around moping. That's when stories end, isn't it? When people show they've learned things, and problems get solved. I've seen loads of films like that. We'd sort out Martin today, and then turn our minds to JJ, and then me, and then Maureen. And we'd meet on the roof after ninety days, and smile, and hug, and know that we had moved on."  -Jess

This isn't quite how the book goes, exactly, but it ends very realistically for life, if not with a photo finish or any easy solves (again, see below spoiler cut). It's a "content for now, I suppose, more or less" kind of ending, which works for this. And things are handled incredibly realistically in this book. There's no magical solution that comes up for anybody, and some folks get some slight bonuses in life while others do not. In the end, the book just kinda stops, presumably with our main characters continuing to plug along somehow, like the rest of us.  

Quote Corner:

• "There simply weren't enough regrets, and lots and lots of reasons to jump." -Martin
• "The life I was leading didn't let me be, I don't know...be who I thought it was.." -JJ
• "It was my own stupid fault. Of course there'd be a low-rent crowd there. I should have picked a classier date--like March 28, when Virginia Woolf took her walk into the river, or Nick Drake's November 25." -JJ
• "It's always the toilet bit that upsets people. Whenever I've had to moan before--when I need another prescription for my antidepressants, for example--I always mention the toilet bit, the cleaning up that needs doing most days. It's funny, because it's the bit that I've got used to. I can't get used to the idea that my life is finished, pointless, too hard, completely without hope or color, but the mopping up doesn't really worry me any more. That's always what gets the doctor reaching for his pen, though." -Maureen
• "I was crying because all I wanted n the world, the only thing that would make me want to live, was for Matty to die." -Maureen
• "But there's another answer too, isn't there? And the other answer is, No, of course I don't, you fool. Please stop me. Please help me. Please make me into the kind of person who wants to live... Because that's why I was up there--there wasn't quite enough to stop me." -Maureen
• "Because that's what the four of us had done--crossed a line. I don't mean we'd done anything bad. I just mean that something had happened to us which separated us from lots of other people." -Jess
• Jess on Martin: "Nobody likes him, which is weird, because he's famous. How can you be famous if nobody likes you?...The reason they're paid a lot of money, it seems to me, is because strangers yell terrible words at them in the street. Even a traffic warden doesn't get called a cunt when he's out shopping with his family." 
• "But some days--most days--I want to scream and shout and break things and kill people. Oh, there's anger, right enough. You can't be stuck with a life like this and not get angry." -Maureen
• "If you think about it, that was one of the most humiliating aspects of the last few years. The papers have been full of shit about me, and every last word of that shit was true." -Martin
• "No, we were finished as serious people. We had sold our seriosity for twelve hundred and fifty of your English pounds, and as far as I could tell that money was going to have to last us for the rest of our lives, unless we saw God, or Elvis, or Princess Di. And next time we'd have to see them for real, and take photos." -JJ

There will also be another Quote Corner below the spoiler cut.

Overall, I give it four and a half stars. This is near epic for a very small-ish sort of story. Seriously, I highly recommend it. 

Spoiler space

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Spoiler Quote Corner:

• "The guy who jumped had two profound and apparently contradictory effects on us all. Firstly, he made us realize that we weren't capable of killing ourselves. And secondly, this information made us suicidal again." -Martin.
• "This is it. There's no way out. Not even the way out is the way out. Not for us." -Martin
• "There was something else in the article I read: an interview with a man who'd survived after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He said that two seconds after jumping, he realized that there was nothing in his life he couldn't deal with, no problem he couldn't solve--apart from the problem he'd just given himself by jumping off the bridge." -Martin
• "This poor David hadn't wanted to talk to us, that  was the thing I'd noticed. He'd come to jump, not to natter. I thought I'd gone to jump, but I ended up nattering anyway. If you thought about it, this David fella and me, we were opposites. He'd killed himself because his children were gone, and I'd thought about it because my son was still around." -Maureen.
• "Anyway, the point was that we went through a whole journey to the middle of fucking nowhere without me asking her whether she had sex doggy style or anything like that. And when I realized then was that I'd come a long way since New Year's Eve. I'd grown as a person." -Jess on Maureen
• "Also, this intervention is sort of the other way round. Because we're asking you to intervene. It's us coming to you, rather than you coming to us. We're saying to you. We need your help." -Jess
• "So how come I've learned absolutely bugger all?" -Martin
• "I just thought that if I told them they had to help me, they'd help me. I never realized there was nothing I could say, and nothing they could say, and nothing they could do. So that moment, when Mum asked me how they could help, it was sort of like the moment the guy jumped off the roof....But you know how you keep things tucked up in the back of your head in a sort of rainy-day box? For example, you think, One day, if I can't handle it any more, then I'll top myself. One day, if I'm really fucking up badly, then I'll just gives up and ask Mum and Dad to bail me out. Anyway, the mental rainy-day box was empty now, and the joke was that there had never been anything in it all the time." -Jess
• "We were up on the roof because we couldn't find a way back into life, and being shut out of it like that..It just fucking destroys you, man." -JJ
• "I went to Toppers' House because I had called and called and called, and there was no delivery, and my days of trouble seemed to have lasted too long, and showed no signs of ending. But He did hear me, in the end, and He sent me Martin and JJ and Jess, and then He sent me Stephen and Sean and the quiz, and then He sent me Jack and the newsagent's. In other words, He proved to me that He was listening. How could I have carried on doubting Him, with all that evidence?" -Maureen

Maureen seems to kind of get it the best in the end. Her simple wishes for Cosmic Tony are along the lines of a vacation, a job (unlike Americans, she gets paid to take care of her son), and to join a quiz team, and she gets them and you're quietly thrilled for her. Matty remains alive--in another story I bet Matty would somehow die in a faultless, blameless way so Maureen could be off the hook and live life if she wanted to, but that doesn't happen here. (I am, however, relieved that murdering Matty doesn't come up, because I was seriously concerned that Jess might get a bright idea.) 

JJ starts busking, which he seems to both like and hate all at once, but at least he's doing music, even if he'll be poor and unsuccessful all his life.

Martin and Jess, I dunno. Martin starts tutoring an idiot kid and still doesn't exactly feel like he's improving any, and Jess sleeps with some random dude she calls "Nodog" and seems to think it's profound. But that sounds typical for them and certainly in character.