Slam, Nick Hornby

Slam, Nick Hornby
Book Review

Slam is a realistic book for young and old. Sam is 16 years old, and he`s most interested in skateboard and girls. When he meets Alicia, he falls in love. They been together. But that`s not in a long time, when Sam break up. And some day after Alicia was pregnant. Alicia`s parents want that Alicia shall get the baby, and Sam is going to be a father he really don`t know he can manage. Who can he manage to be father in a sow young age? It don`t help that Alicia`s parents is some person who need to know everything, and then lay the hole responsible at Sam. It`s just one man who can help Sam now, and that`s he`s hero, Tony Hawk. The most famous skater ever.
Sam and his mother are happy enough, but they’re barely getting by. Sam isn’t optimistic about what he`s life. Sometimes it can seem as though kids always do better than their parents, in the smart and sad voice with which Hornby has supplied him. You know someone’s dad was a coal miner, or whatever, but his son goes on to play for a Premiership team, or wins ‘Pop Idol,’ or invents the Internet. Those stories make you feel as though the whole world is on its way up. But in our family, people always slip up on the first step. In fact, most of the time they don’t even find the stairs.”
What happens in “Slam” is, quite simply, this: Sam gets his new girlfriend, Alicia, pregnant. Alicia’s parents are university professors, Sam’s father is a plumber who see Sam as “some hoodie chav.” They want their daughter to jettison both him and the fetus. What ensues is an agreeably casual and occasionally effervescent comedy of manners, one that has plenty to say about class and sex and family and this being a Nick Hornby novel how pop music relates to it all and ties it all together. There are many differences between a baby and an iPod, Sam thinks. And one of the biggest differences is, no one’s going to mug you for your baby.
Hornby has a knack, in “Slam,” for taking predictable moments and turning them into gently glowing satire. When Sam has to tell the school authorities he’s going to be a father, for example, he expects stern judgment. But as
“Slam” slides by on its author’s enormous charm, however, and on its exploration of some hard-won truths, including this encompassing definition of what adult love really is: a project full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that.