Slam
By Nick Hornby
Putnam, 293 pp., $19.99
Fifteen-year-old London teenager Sam Jones seems to have things pretty well worked out: He's an excellent skater (translation: skateboarder), he has a good relationship with his single mom, and he's on track to go to college someday. And - no small point this, if you're a male teenager - his girlfriend, Alicia, is very posh and so pretty that she presumes someday she will become a model.
Around his 16th birthday, however, just as Sam is growing a little tired of Alicia, the worst thing that he can possibly imagine occurs: Alicia becomes pregnant and announces that she is going to keep the baby.
Such is the premise of Nick Hornby's new, coming-of-age tale, "Slam." The novel, Hornby's first for young adults, straddles the line between that genre and adult fiction, and in some ways feels a bit like Hornby Lite. There are the themes that have peppered Hornby's work in the past: the ways that grown men act like boys, their difficulties with commitment, and the odd, wistfully beautiful (and slightly hopeful) ways families are formed by strangers in the new millennium. There are also Hornby's often howlingly funny and spot-on observations about life.
But there is also a pair of plot machinations that may be acceptable in a YA novel, but are not entirely convincing in a book for grown-ups.
The first is that when Sam is alone, he talks a lot to his poster of skating legend Tony Hawk, who responds in Sam's head with quotes from Hawk's real-life memoir, "Hawk: Occupation: Skateboarder." Sometimes Sam is grateful for the guidance; other times, because the counsel is always a verbatim passage from Hawk's book, Sam is left baffled by a seeming non sequitur.
Second, twice in the novel Hawk - or someone - whisks Sam off into the future after Alicia's and his baby has been born. Or, perhaps, Sam has dreamed it. He's not quite sure himself, but here is his explanation:
"I know this sounds stupid, but normally, you know when things have happened to you, don't you? Well, I don't. Not anymore. Most of this story I'm telling you happened to me for sure, but there are a couple of little parts, weird parts, I'm not absolutely positive about. I'm pretty sure I didn't dream them up, but I couldn't swear that on Tony Hawk's book, which is my bible. So we're about to come to one of those parts now, and all I can do is tell it straight. You'll have to make your own minds up."
Sam is brought to the future once when his baby is weeks old, and then when the child is a toddler. In each case, when Sam's real future finally arrives, he sees that the premonition was, more or less, accurate.
The principal tension in the novel is whether the eminently likable Sam will do the right thing and try to be a decent father, or whether he will try to find a way to skirt his responsibility. Since Sam is such a nice kid, however, and since Hornby offers us glimpses into his future, there isn't a whole lot of tension. As Sam himself tells his readers two-thirds of the way through the novel, "So you know everything. There's nothing more for me to say. . . . End of story."
Nevertheless, it is still fun (and occasionally moving) to witness the panic and the fear that Sam experiences as he contemplates fatherhood, and Sam certainly has Hornby's wonderful sense of humor. Sam and his mother - who had Sam when she was 16, so was a teenage parent, too - are both charismatic and very amusing. To wit, here is Sam offering his thoughts on babies and their value early in the book: "There were a couple of young mums at my school, and they acted like a baby was an iPod or a new mobile or something, some kind of gadget that they wanted to show off. There are many differences between a baby and an iPod. And one of the biggest differences is, no one's going to mug you for your baby. You don't have to keep a baby in your pocket if you're on a bus late at night. And if you think about it, that must tell you something, because people will mug you for anything worth having, which means a baby can't be worth having." Or, when an old man mistakes Sam for a girl, Sam presumes it's because of his long hair, "seeing as I don't wear a skirt or spend my whole life texting people."
And so while Sam's journey to adulthood is a bit predictable, he tells his story well and is excellent company along the way.
Chris Bohjalian is the author of 10 novels, including "Midwives" and "The Double Bind," which was published earlier this year.
