Adults Will Never Understand

In British author Nick Hornby’s most successful works, he writes about the Peter Pan syndrome—guys having a difficult time becoming adults, and figuring out how to grow up a little too late in life. About a Boy, High Fidelity, and Fever Pitch are populated with this type of character, with poignant and often hilarious results.

In a shift toward young adult fiction, Hornby reverses this paradigm, and the result is questionable—Hornby writes instead about an immature teenage boy who is compelled to grow up by difficult circumstances beyond his control. Slam chronicles the life of Sam, a skateboarding enthusiast who discovers on his 16th birthday that his girlfriend Alicia is pregnant with his child.

Before he knocks up Alicia, Sam is your average teenage boy. Skateboarding takes up most of his time, and his obsession with Tony Hawk is so strong that he habitually confides in his poster of Tony. He tells it his hopes and fears and even imagines the skateboard legend’s responses, based on excerpts from Hawk’s memoir. Then Alicia delivers her news, and Sam’s world is turned upside down. Faced with this life-altering turn of events, Sam is forced to grow up, and much too soon.

Sam is prone to as many dim-witted mistakes as his literary predecessors. Like them, Sam is a likeable character, and readers will find themselves rooting for him from the get-go.

Or they would—if Hornby didn’t insist on treating both Sam and his readers like they were idiots. In a novel that purports to deal with the difficult issue of teen pregnancy, Hornby carefully filters the issues that Sam—and the young reader—grapples with. Hornby completely dodges the difficult question of abortion, which could have added some much-needed depth to this novel. Despite the fact that neither Alicia nor Sam are prepared to take care of a child, that they both have ambitious plans for their futures, and that Sam himself was the result of an unhappy teen pregnancy, abortion is barely mentioned as an option. Had Hornby allowed Sam to confront his choices, the results may have been more interesting, but Hornby apparently considers his teen audience incapable of grappling with complex issues and emotions—bizarre in this day and age, especially when you consider the widespread success of movies like Juno.

The presence of Hornby as narrator is also consistently too strongly felt for Sam’s character to take on a life of its own. Hornby usually writes in the first person, really getting under the skin of his character and developing his personality throughout the narrative. But Sam just ends up sounding fake, as if he is Hornby himself, an older man trying to impersonate a teen. And apparently Hornby does not have a very high opinion of 16-year-olds—his message seems to be that they can deal with pregnancy, just not very intelligently. Thus we get passages like this: “Alicia said that you couldn’t get pregnant while you were pregnant, which is why people are never three or four months older than their brothers or sisters, which I suppose I knew, really, if I’d thought about it.”

Ultimately, Hornby’s poor opinion of teenagers carries over into the way he treats his readers. Sam has the irritating habit of constantly explaining and re-explaining his jokes and insights to us. Even a young teen reader does not need this endless reiteration—after all, Sam’s jokes are not very complex.

The recent trend of novels for “young adults” is successful when the novels actually appeal to all ages. While this book’s target audience is probably a few years younger than your average college student, Hornby’s talent for depicting the average man with comedy and compassion should have made Slam interesting for all age groups, including us students. But this attempt to address an audience of all ages fails when it tries too hard to please everyone, and Slam will end up disappointing us all.