A Book A Week - Week 14: Slam

This week's book:
    Slam    by  Nick Hornby

Grade:    C+ 

Have you ever watched a TV movie - not just one on TV but one made for TV - and it wasn't really good and it wasn't really awful, and you ended up wondering exactly what the writer and director intended you to come away from the experience with?  That was what happened with me and 'Slam.'  I understand the story, but I'm not quite certain why it's a story that needed telling.

A few weeks ago I read 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower,' with a fifteen-year-old boy as the main character.  'Slam' also has a fifteen-year-old boy as its main character, but the stories could not be more different.  Sam - in 'Slam' - is English, lives in London, and is a skate punk.  He meets a girl, they go out, end up having sex, and the girl gets pregnant.  Because Sam doesn't have a lot of friends, and because he's the product of a single-parent household, and because he's living at the bottom end of the British class system, the only person he can confide in is Tony Hawk.*  Or, rather, a poster of him.  Tony Hawk's poster image 'responds' with lines from the real Tony Hawk's biography, which Sam has read so many times he memorized every line.

That's the set-up.  And I don't know if I missed something along the way, but that's pretty much the wrap-up too.  The story moves along, but it's about how this confused kid tries to come to grips with the fact that he's going to be a father before he's even done being a kid himself.
     Oh, and there's the time-travel.

Say what... ?  Yup. Some force - perhaps the poster of Tony Hawk - sends Sam forward a few months in time to after his child is born.  Matter of fact, he goes forward twice.  It's not a 'Christmas Carol' thing, where Sam watches himself, he's pushed forward in time and takes his own place.  This is what agents, editors, and publishers call 'magical realism' and readers call 'some weird stuff happens.'  Sam's gritty, lower-class English life is invaded by time travel.  I wanted to say 'altered by' time travel, but it's not.  It's not and he's not.  Both time-travel episodes end with nothing changing about Sam's present, and nothing changing about Sam himself.  So what was the point of it all, really?

'Slam' comes from skate punk slang, meaning to wreck really badly and spectacularly.  It's what happens to Sam's life when he gets Alicia pregnant.  Or at least that's the metaphor the author intends.  But because Sam goes to great lengths to lay out just how far down on the socio-economic ladder he feels his family already is, the fact that nothing really changes in his life except for the fact that he has a son doesn't feel like much of a slam at all.  It almost feels like something that is so normal for him that it would have been more remarkable if it hadn't happened.

I had a friend in college who was already well on his way to being a rambling old man.  He would start telling a story, and it was only when you were five minutes into it that you realized he had no point.  He was just telling you a bunch of stuff that happened, in the order that it happened to him.  No life-changing revelation, no humorous anecdote, no urgent peril, he just wanted to talk about the time he bought a brand-new ice chest for the fishing trip.
   This book felt to me like talking to Craig again.  A decent way to pass the time, but don't expect to learn anything new or to be entertained all that much.

Maybe this book just isn't intended for me.  It's certainly well-written, but it didn't speak to me or to my experiences.  I'd say it would be a decent read for someone who already had an established taste for 'magical realism.' 

Next week:
   The Grand Design   by  Stephen Hawking
   Back to non-fiction with the legendary physicist's latest book.

*grandparents, Tony Hawk is a professional skateboarder.  Yes, that is a real occupation, and Tony Hawk is a real person who is also a multi-millionaire.  Makes you wish you'd been nicer to the neighborhood kids doing jumps off your curb, doesn't it?