Rob tries dating a singer called Marie (a post-Partridge Family, pre-L.A. ) top five episodes of Cheers (the one where Woody sang his stupid song to Kelly.

) top five Elvis Costello songs ('Alison'. They speak the masculine language of lists, endlessly reviewing their top five films (Reservoir Dogs. Rob seeks refuge in the company of Barry and Dick, the offbeat clerks at his store. After all, could he have spent his life with someone who has a bad record collection? This narrowly misses his list of all-time top five most memorable split-ups. His girlfriend Laura has just left him for Ian from the flat upstairs. After seeing the 'quality' of chick-lit, this comparison would do a great disservice to this book, but it may help anyway to let prospective readers know what to expect, since it's not high-brow and it definitely deals with feelings and is hard to categorize as any genre in particular.High Fidelity is the story of Rob, a pop music junkie who runs his own semi-failing record store. Maybe it's because it deals with feelings regarding modern relationships, and it replaces shoes and accesories with records. There's a lot of self-deprecation in High Fidelity, and it makes for its funniest moments.Īs someone said, this book is like 'guy-lit', that is, it ought to occupy the same place in the commercial book world as 'chick-lit'. It seems to me that Fever Pitch is much more raw and bereft of the 'cool' imposture, showing more of the actual person behind the story. You may argue that Rob isn't cool anymore, but I think his lifestyle definitely has some of that wish-fulfillment every office worker dreams about (i.e, not having a job, doing your own thing, revert to adolescence). It seems like, for as much as Nick puts of himself in the page, that High Fidelity still has a lot of the artist's pretense to show himself (or his alter-ego) as cool.

It's insightful in its best passages, but not quite moving as Fever Pitch, the other Hornby book I read. It's very funny and any male can definitely see himself reflected in some (not all, or you'd be a bastard) of Rob's attitudes. The movie's an almost perfect adaptation of the book (not surprisingly, since the narration and the plot are pretty straightforward and very suitable as screenplay material). Since I saw the movie before reading the book, this one held no surprises for me.

High fidelity nick