Some people talk to themselves, others talk to their dog or cat, but in Nick Hornby’s “Slam,” the main character talks to a Tony Hawk poster.
It’s a storytelling quirk that becomes less and less necessary to move the plot as the book goes along, but every time Sam talks to TH (as he calls him for sake of not having to write it out over and over) I couldn’t help but laugh. He doesn’t hear words he would imagine coming from TH, but rather quotes from the autobiography that skating-obsessed Sam has read a thousand times.
Take, for example, when he breaks up with his girlfriend and asks TH if he did something wrong by ending things:
“‘If something in my life didn’t revolve around skating, then I had a hard time figuring it out,’ said T.H. He was talking about Sandy again, his first real girlfriend, but it might have been his way of saying, ‘How the hell do I know? I’m only a skater.’ Or even, ‘I’m only a poster.'”
That’s the beauty of the Sam-TH relationship. It’s like thinking about Stewie on Family Guy and why sometimes the adults can understand what he’s saying and sometimes they can’t. When it’s convenient for Sam (TH agrees with him) then he totally buys in, but at other times he’s very quick to point out the lunacy of the whole thing.
Sam needs all this advice from TH because he’s prone to getting himself into trouble, which isn’t all that unexpected since he’s 16. Sure that the ex-girlfriend, Alicia, is pregnant, he runs off instead of actually hearing the news in a plan that unravels spectacularly from the beginning. When he comes back, he vows to be smarter, but knows that’s easier said than done.
“It’s not enough, though, just to decide not to be stupid. Otherwise, why don’t we decide to be really clever — clever enough to invent something like the iPod and make a lot of money?”
Later Sam and Alicia have an argument in which she accuses him of thinking he has a future for himself, while she is destined for a dead-end life. He responds by bringing up her stated aspiration of being a model — something she told him in a flirty manner when they first met to gauge his interest. Naturally, that only made things worse for Sam, who realized his error in mixing a good moment with this one.
“You should never drag stuff out of a nice conversation and chuck it back in the middle of a nasty one. Instead of one good memory and one bad memory, you’re left with two shitty ones.”
Hornby has been one of my favorite authors for a while, and while this is far from my favorite book of his, he did toss in something I’m sure was just for me:
“I didn’t call Alicia’s dad Mr. Burns anymore. I called him Robert, which was better, because every time I said Mr. Burns, I thought of an ancient bald bloke who owned the Springfield nuclear reactor.”
I want a Milhouse reference in the next book, Nick.