Slam is also something new. Teen novels are usually penned by people who, well, only write teen novels. For Hornby to have a go at one is an interesting proposition — it risks alienating both his long-time fans and, if he doesn’t get the voice just right, his intended audience.
Two British writers, each entering his second half-century. Two very different books, posing formal challenges while simultaneously playing to the writers’ respective strengths. Both, more or less, successful.
To be young again
“I’m not sure that I decided to write a ‘teen novel,’ ” Hornby tells the Phoenix from his home in London. “I think I had an idea — I wanted to write about a young father, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that I wanted to write in the first person, and therefore it was, probably, a teen book.”
Slam introduces us to Sam, a 16-year-old London skate rat who, one day, after a clumsy and typically teenage courtship, discovers that his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend will, in eight-or-so months time, be holding a one-minute-old baby. With a deft touch, Hornby takes us through the ups and downs of the emotional half-pipe of a future father who, not long ago, was a baby himself.
Hornby’s been thinking about adolescents and adolescence a lot lately. “I’ve noticed that teens have been coming to readings, which interested me,” he says. “I think a lot of teens read About a Boy after seeing the movie. So I did have this young component to my readership.”
But it’s a tricky proposition for a 50-year-old man to inhabit the consciousness of a fictional 16-year-old boy and hope real-life 16-year-old boys will relate. (Actually, Slam is told by Sam as an 18-year-old, looking back over the past two years. But still.) It’s a tightrope act: one risks being deaf to the nuances of speech, or clueless about current youth-culture touchstones. Worse, there’s always the chance kids might think they’re being patronized.
Hornby took the chance, basing his character, in part, on his own experiences. Sam, he says, “is not me by any means, but I tried to recollect as much as I possibly could about the feelings of panic that this might have engendered with me when I was 16. I used a lot of stuff from my own adolescence, but then I tried to work out what is different for kids now.”
His tack seems to have worked. All the contemporary teen totems are there: cell phones buzzing with urgent text messages, iPods, skateboards. (Sam idolizes Tony Hawk, and treats his bedside poster of the skater as a sort of confessional, a two-dimensional, inanimate therapist. In a conceit that shouldn’t work, but does, Hornby has Hawk talk back.)
And Hornby is adept at evoking the purgatory of teenagerdom, with its equal parts arrogance and awkwardness. Even better is the pitch-perfect way he describes the thoughts and fears of Sam and his girlfriend, Alicia.
Sam, when he realizes he’s about to be a father:
I wanted to sit on my mum’s lap. I know that sounds stupid and babyish, but I couldn’t help it. On my sixteenth birthday, I didn’t want to be sixteen, or fifteen, or anyteen. I wanted to be three or four, and too young to make any kind of mess, apart from the mess you make when you scribble on the walls or tip your food bowl upside down.
But even if Hornby’s 15-year-old nephew reassured his uncle that the book hits its mark (“and he can be pretty horrible to me,” the writer says with a laugh), it’s wrong to pigeonhole Slam as young-adult fiction.
