High Fidelity

By Nick Hornby
Published by Riverhead Books

We geeks have many disturbing tendencies, not the least of which is our constant need to find affirmation of our sheltered, obsessive lifestyle. We hunger for someone to tell us it's okay to drop forty bucks on an Elvis Costello bootleg, to camp out five days for Star Wars tickets, to push our credit limit perilously close to its max by buying a DVD player.

Aside from being a brilliant first-person novel about man's inhumanity toward women, Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is great geek affirmation. Its protagonist, Rob Gordon, is so damn cool and has such great taste that if you care passionately about music, you will desperately want to find bits of yourself in him, and you probably will. You may fall so hard for Rob that you fail to note that he's intensely immature, that he's subject to periods of asshole behavior, that he's mean and fights change with a vengeance. Hey, he's got a bitchin' record collection--what else is there?

There can be plenty more to an adult life than a bitchin' record collection, which is ultimately High Fidelity's point. Rob begins the novel having just suffered through a break-up with Laura, the woman he's been living with. She's a lawyer, he owns a record store called Championship Vinyl. She's a fairly real person, grounded in the world around her, and he lives in a geek Fantasyland where the most important thing isn't what you're like, but what you like. Rob battles against that notion--that a person's tastes don't define a person's self--throughout the book, to varying degrees of success.

Over the course of that battle, he offers a concise self-portrait of your average male's varying weaknesses. He's terrified of committment. He's self-centered and callous. He's probably harder on himself than any woman could ever be, and yet nothing ever comes of it. Remember, he's terrified of change.

What will draw you in to High Fidelity and keep you reading is Hornby's realization of Rob's voice. It's one of the all-time great first-person novels. Rob is funny and perceptive, and yet at the same time, you have to be careful just how much you trust his appraisals of situations. There's a brilliant clash between the way he percieves his environment and the way the reader knows it to be. We can see his problems and where they'll lead better than he can--which makes it both fun and sad to watch him stumble into destructive behavior. We can't reach through the page and slap this scruffy, loveable guy around. We have to watch him hit rock bottom in the back seat of Laura's car after her father's funeral before he can begin his journey back to the top.

Hornby also manages to develop a rich cast of supporting characters, especially with regard to the women in Rob's life. After he breaks up with Laura, Rob sets out to confront his all-time top five breakups of all time, and each of these characters are rich and textured, even though several of them only appear for a scene or two. Marie LaSalle, an American folk singer who slides into Rob's circle of friends, is in some senses a female Rob, and yet she has a greater self-awareness than he has. She knows where she stands in her life, and he's still stumbling around for answers, ultimately realizing that he'd been sleeping next to them in his cramped flat for the past several years.

There are moments of awareness in High Fidelity that are terrifying in their truth, especially if you start to identify with Rob. It may very well change the way you percieve your own life, and like many fans, you may slowly find yourself becoming Rob, or at least wishing you could. Be careful, though, because even Rob realizes that it's ultimately not healthy to build your life around your record collection. Happiness isn't warm vinyl; it's a warm body in your arms that you love in spite of her passion for Art Garfunkel's solo material.

Check back at Pop-Culture-Corn on Friday for our review of John Cusack's film version of High Fidelity!