In Review

21 November 2008 20:35 BST

Slam by Nick Hornby

Published by Penguin, out October 4th, 293 pages, £12.99.

In a nutshell...

In the skate shoes of a teen

What's it all about?

Sam is your average teenager in many ways. He's into skating (with boards not ice as he often has to point out to naïve adults), has short-term relationships with girls and doesn't really get an awful lot out of school. He was also born when his mum was just 16 and sees increasingly little of his dad. But what is perhaps not so normal is that he turns to a poster of skate guru Tony Hawk for advice about every part of his life and also has an unnerving capacity to be 'whizzed' into his future.

Things get rather complicated when he meets a girl, sleeps with the girl, splits up with the girl and then gets a phone-call from the girl to tell her she's pregnant. He finds himself having to deal with having a son who is older than his newborn sister, a mum who's a 30-odd-year-old grandmother and a life that now revolves more around jabs and dirty nappies than it does ollies and kick-flips.

Who's it by?

Nick Hornby, the man who brought us Fever Pitch, About a Boy and High Fidelity among others, has turned his attention to teenage writing for Slam. His previous works have all been bestsellers and this should see him make his mark with a new generation of readers.

He is an avid Arsenal fan who lives and works in Highbury, north London, and it was his musings on the Gunners' dramatic title win in 1989 in Fever Pitch which brought him his first success as an author. He began life as a journalist and has written for GQ, Time and Vogue among others. How To Be Good was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001 and Long Way Down made the shortlist for the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

As an example

"Tony Hawk lost his virginity when he was sixteen. He'd just skated in a contest called the King of the Mount at a place called Trashmore in Virginia Beach. He says in his book that he lasted half as long as a run in a vert contest. A run in a vert contest takes forty-five seconds. So he lasted twenty-two seconds. I was glad he told me. I never forgot those figures." – Sam recounts another pearl of wisdom from his life guru.

"She sort of ripped off the all-in-one tracksuit thing that babies wear then she pulled its legs out and undid the tags on the side of the nappy. Then with one hand she held the legs up, and with the other she wiped its arse with a wet paper hankie thing. The actual crap part wasn't too terrible." – Sam tries to learn the intricacies of child rearing on one of his 'whizzes' into the future.

Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood Blockbuster

Few have a better record than Hornby when it comes to writing books which turn into hit movies. Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and, most successfully, About A Boy, have all resulted in good box office figures and few would bet against Slam doing exactly the same. About A Boy's Nicholas Hoult to star as Sam perhaps?

What the others say

"There is a lot that rings true in Slam; the clumsy conversations and sex of adolescence, the excruciating scenes of having to break the news to furious parents, the honest appraisal of how relationships stagger along or dizzying infatuations rapidly peter out. He is spot-on with the way a conversation with a teenage boy contains more meaningful silences than Harold Pinter's entire oeuvre yet girls can't resist texting their every waking thought." – Scotsman

"Some will assume that Nick Hornby has dropped down a division with Slam, his first teenage novel. But that would be a schoolboy error that few schoolboys will make. Hornby's work, most notably in Fever Pitch and About a Boy, has always been interested in the mundane insecurities and comic tensions of male maturation. What makes a boy a man is a question that is almost as integral to his writing as its reverse: what makes a man a boy." – Guardian

So is it any good?

This was a brave move by Hornby, but one which he has just about pulled off. Taking on the persona and vocabulary of a teenage boy when a 50-year-old man is fraught with danger and there are moments when it seems as if Hornby may have bitten off more than he can chew. The seemingly random additions to the text of teenspeak – 'ha ha ha' at the end of sentences for example – are hard not to wince at but the story itself has much to say.

Hornby seeks to literalise the usual teenage misadventures – sex, parental divorce, scrapes with the law and so on – and uses the sceptre of skating guru Tony Hawk, or rather a poster of him on Sam's wall, to act as the 15-year-old’s moral compass. Sam talks to his skating hero when he is unsure of what path to take in life and Hawk 'replies' by virtue of snatches from his autobiography which Sam has memorised after dozens of read-throughs.

This can be accepted easily by the reader but what is somewhat harder to comprehend is when Sam is "whizzed" into the future by Hawk and sees what his life will be like a year in the future. This only happens on a couple of occasions in the books when a panicked Sam sees himself as a young father sharing a bed with his girlfriend at her family home just after realising that she may be pregnant and then finds himself taking his young child, unsuccessfully as it turns out, for his childhood jabs.

When adults try to delve into the issues at the heart of teenagers they often make themselves look ridiculous. This is particularly so when an author tries to enter the mind of one who is growing up in a world 30 years on from their own golden years. But Hornby seems to have nailed it. Sixteen-year-old boys could do a lot worse than take a look at his ruminations about their lives, while adults too probably have more to learn here than they may think.

8/10

Martin Ashplant