Questions about Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity

Here are some questions for you to think about. These questions are designed: (i) to give us topics about in class (you are not expected to have answers to all of them, but you should select some that you personally find most interesting and illuminating); and (ii) to give you ideas for your papers (for which more specif direction will shortly be forthcoming). We can’t handle them all, but they should provide interesting and revealing ways of thinking about the novel and the film.

1.        Who is the speaker and to whom is he speaking?

2.         What kind of person is Rob Fleming? How ordinary is he? How neurotic?

3.         Why does he have problems with women? Who leaves whom?

4.         What are the worst things Rob does? What are the best? What are his flaws as a conversationalist?

5.         Who are his friends?

6.         Why are there so many questions (and question marks) in the novel?

7.         What is the symbolic and dramatic function of the lists? When does the list fail to work? Do you make such lists? Why?

8.         What does Laura see in Rob?

9.         How will men see their identities reflected in Rob’s (if at all)?

10.       How are parents portrayed in the novel?

11.       What will Rob teach female readers about men?

12        What role do the Musical Moron Twins play?

13.       What function do Championship Vinyl, popular music, and record collections serve in the novel? Do you find any of the musical allusions arcane?

14.       What is the size of Rob’s penis?

15        What scenes have been deleted from the novel in the movie? Why? What scenes have been added? Why? Why do you think the movie was filmed in Chicago rather than London?

16.       How is Laura portrayed? Is she portrayed differently in the movie?

17        Why is Rob always “sorting” his record collection? Of what else is the word “sorted” used?

18.       What social occasions are described in the novel and what is their significance?

19.       Bridget Jones’s Diary was published a year after High Fidelity. How much does Helen Fielding owe to Nick Hornby? What do the two novels have in common? What differentiates them? Make a list.

20.       Nick Hornby has complained that English authors, unlike American authors, “don’t seem to believe in emotion or redemption. They think that it’s vulgar.” What emotion and redemption does High Fidelity offer?

21. Hornby has said that “I don’t think of High Fidelity as a real hip book. It’s probably hip for publishing, because they really don’t get it–if you read any kind of hip magazines it’s usually painfully unhip . . . it has some rock and roll in it. It’s sort of redemptive, which isn’t very hip.”

22. Hornby remarks that too many contemporary English authors

write for a very small audience . . . the very sort of quiet, crafted English fiction by people who are very well known doesn’t really do an awful lot for anybody, and just seems very static and staid. It doesn’t really deal with the world that I live in. I’ve always read American people since I started to write.” In what ways, if any, does High Fidelity strike you as “American”?

23. When Hornby was complimented for having “such insight into some stereotypically male issues–fear of commitment, fear of intimacy, etc.” he was asked if he was “anything like Rob Fleming?” Hornby replied:

Rob doesn’t have an awful lot of perspective on relationships and I suppose if I didn’t, then I wouldn’t have been able to write the book. There were times I found myself writing something that maybe was too smart for him, or something where he’d gotten too much insight into something too quickly. When I wrote something that made complete sense to me, that meant that I’d gone a bit too far.

Has Hornby been consistently successful?

24. One of main themes of High Fidelity is (supposedly) “that most people stop growing up after adolescence.” Hornby comments:

I think it’s really hard to find people you meet who you think, “That person is 100% adult.” I really don’t know a whole lot of people like that, more women than men, though. There is a great streak of childishness–well, not childishness really, because so much of it revolves around sex–but you can find it in everyone.

Does this comment illuminate the novel? Is it true?

25. Hornby planned to become a screenwriter (and is currently working on a film adaptation of Dave Eggers’ A Work of Staggering Genius). He remarks that

The degree of examination that goes on in a film is very interesting for a writer, because there’s not a line that goes unchallenged in a script. You do so many drafts, so every single conjunction is subject to some thought, which never happens with books. Or it happens less and less because there are fewer and fewer good editors working in publishing houses. If you’re a best-selling writer, then they just want to chuck the book out there, because people will buy it anyway. If you’re a new writer, then who gives a shit, why put all this work into something no one’s going to read. And you’re lucky to find editors who are prepared to sit down and work hard with you, whereas on film they have to do it. I came away with the idea that I’d like to write books the way people write screenplays. I think, I’m not going to let another line go through unexamined.

Does this strike you as an accurate description? Hornby had worked on the screenplay for Fever Pitch (a non-fiction book about enthusiasts for English soccer, starring Colin Firth). He has commented how much he enjoyed the collaboration (“most writers of prose get really defensive about being edited”) because it was not a solitary activity like writing itself. Did he write the screenplay for High Fidelity?

26. The Director of High Fidelity is Stephen Frears. Is his filmography relevant to the movie?

27. Reviewers have written: “Hornby’s amazingly accomplished debut should definitely appeal to music fans and snobs [would Hornby agree?], but it’s his literate, painfully honest riffs on romantic humiliation and heartbreak that makes the book so special. A rare, touching glimpse of the masculine view of affairs of the heart” (starred review ALA Booklist). “A disarming, rueful, and sometimes quite funny first novel that is not quite as hip as it wants to be . . . ingratiating saturation in pop culture. Sometimes this can pall” (Publishers Weekly). “Elegantly crafted, subtly plotted . . . And yet the book still reads more like a piece of lifestyle journalism than a work of art” (London Review of Books). “This is a wonderful read, funny and moving. It’s not a novel exactly, but who cares.” “Such a relief actually to enjoy a novel and not worry about whether it’s Great Literature. I’ll put HF on my own list of best five funny, light novels of contemporary times.”

            How do these evaluations compare with those of BJD? Do some web-crawling of your own (in order to move beyond the blurbs) and tell me what you find out about reviews of Hornby’s novel and the movie made from it. Feel free to use them, duly acknowledged, in your papers.

28. The long four-star review in The Discerning Film Lover’s Guide 2002-3 (St Martin’s Press) from TLA video concludes: “There are lots of reasons to see High Fidelity, but the top five: 1) Cusack’s great turn 2) a smart screenplay 3) what it has to say about men, women, and relationships 4) perceptive direction and 5) it’s just so damn funny.” Is your list the same? How does the soundtrack differ from that in BJD?

29.       Evaluate the closing credits for HF. We do not live in a “poster culture” unlike the Brits. What difference does this make.