You’d keep your options open for the rest of your life, if you could. Something more than waiting for life to change and keeping your options open. Running a scout troop, or running a club even. It takes Laura to tell him what he should already know when Rob asks “So what should I be doing?”, she replies: We got to adolescence and just stopped dead we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were. None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. When big, life-changing transitions stop happening on a regular basis, (from high school to college, college to grad school and/or work), it becomes distressingly easy to slip into a single path and lose the willingness necessary to make radical changes, whether in work, the mind, or love. But sometimes he (or she) is the catalyst for doing what should have been done long before. There are moments of astute observation too, as when Laura says “sometimes you need someone to lob into the middle of a bad relationship like a hand grenade and blow it all apart.” Which is true, even if the hand grenade is often made out to be the bad guy (or girl) in the relationship. The continuous happening in the plot contrasts with the non-happening in many of the characters’ lives.

Rob’s voice and attitude carry the book, as does the writing, which is largely about nothing yet still moves rapidly from incident to incident, creating plot, which is easily overlooked in novels like this, such as Wilson’s Flatscreen.

OK, not really a name, but I can see where it came from, and why I wanted to sleep with Rosie the pain-in-the-arse simultaneous orgasm woman, and if that sounds feeble and self-serving at the same time-oh, right! He sleeps with other women because he has a fear of death!-well, I’m sorry, but that’s the way things are. There were some nights with Laura when I’d kind of nestle into her back in bed when she was asleep, and I’d be filled with this enormous, nameless terror, except now I have a name for it: Brian. I still laughed aloud many times at High Fidelity, although the jokes are almost all context-dependent and so can’t be quoted without causing a quizzical look that says, “You really think that’s funny?” Flipping through it doesn’t yield anything obvious, but I kept smiling at many moments.

High fidelity nick