From StarMag, 29th June, 2008Review by DAPHNE LEE
SLAM
By Nick Hornby
Publisher: Penguin, 342 pages
(ISBN: 978-0141324494)
I THOUGHT Slam was going to be about skateboarding. I was wrong and glad I was wrong. I used to skateboard when a teen - to impress a huge crush I had, who roller skated, but I didn't do any impressive stunts and I didn't think I'd be interested in reading about a guy doing them. However, as I said, Slam is not about skateboarding. It's just about Sam who skates and who worships the air skating champion Tony Hawks flips through.
He's so into Tony Hawk (or TH as he calls him) that he talks to a poster of the skater (skateboarding and skateboarder, Sam says, would be terms used only by losers) and, as he's read Hawk's authobiography countless times, finds it really easy to imagine his hero talking back, giving him advice, offering opinions, telling him where he's gone wrong and what he's done that's worthy of praise.
Anyway, Sam is a 15-year-old lad who lives with his single mum. Near the start of the book, Sam morosely reflects that his family isn't the sort that goes from strength to strength, each generation doing a little better than the one before. Instead, everyone just takes turns to make stupid mistakes that put paid to any hopes of success: "In our family," Sam says, "people always slip up on the first step. In fact, most of the time they don't even find the stairs."
Sam's mum's mistake was to have him at 16. She's only 32 - young for a mum, so young that Sam's skating buddy, Rabbit, considers asking her out! So, Sam is well aware that his family hasn't a good track record and although things seem to be shaping up nicely for him - he's doing well in school, especially in art; he's learning difficult skating tricks; and he has a girlfriend, a beautiful girlfriend called Alicia - you just know that this happy state of affairs isn't going to last for long. If they did, there'd probably be no book. Or a different book, anyway. Maybe one about skating!
Well, unfortunately for poor Sam and fortunately for those of us who'd loathe pages of him waxing lyrical about ollies, kickturns, 50-50 grinds and other skating tricks, the lad slips up, right according to family tradition. On his 16th birthday, Alicia announces that she's pregnant and Sam ... well, Sam, being young and stupid, runs off to Hastings where he hopes to remain for the rest of his life in blessed, childless anonymity.
However, since Sam is, deep-down, a good kid and life in Hastings isn't as easy as he envisions it, he comes right back and faces the music. This, as he's 16 and clueless, basically means panicking a great deal and making things up as he goes along, which new parents, no matter their age, do anyway. For Sam, things are rather more difficult though. Not only does he have to deal with problems that no 16 year old should have to face, he is denied the chance to face them one day at a time.
For some reason, Sam finds himself being whisked back and forward through time so that he's thrown headfirst into difficult situations. This results in some awkwardness. For example, when he has to get his baby vaccinated, he has no idea what the kid is called. And he has to do a nappy change practically not knowing one end of a baby from the other.
It is a bit like that though, being a new parent, so I think Hornby has hit on a plot device that conveys most effectively the shock-horror sensations experienced in the early days of parenthood. But as far as Sam's concerned, all this whizzing about through time is TH's doing. TH himself made his fair share of stupid mistakes and this is, supposedly, his way to helping Sam to cope with the consequences of being a young idiot. In a warped sort of way, it works: when Sam gets around to reliving those moments that he fast-forwarded to before, he has the benefit of hindsight and experience and is able to behave quite sensibly ... for a change.
If you've read Hornby's other novels, you'll know that men behaving badly is what the author is best at portraying. Or, or at very least, men behaving like selfish, petulant children. Sam, to break the mold, is a young lad behaving quite well, all things considered. Sure, he's flippant and foolish, and there are plenty of moments when you want to shake some sense and feeling into him, but he's 16, and he's allowed to have these moments. You expect him to be imperfect and make mistakes, you're prepared for heartless, cowarDly behaviour like attempting to dump Alicia by simply avoiding her, and you can even smile at idiotic ideas like choosing Green Day's American Idiot to play in the labour room.
This is Hornby's first young adult novel and it looks like he remembers rather well what it was like to be a teenager who expects not to make decisions more difficult that what cereal to eat in the morning and how many 'O' levels to take.
When he says something like how someone might try to steal your IPod but never your baby, it's cringe-worthy, but only if you're a parent whose greatest fear is that someone will kidnap little Timmy from his stroller at the playground. If you're a teen it's spot on and rather funny.
It's impossible not to like Sam, warts and all. And, after all, he isn't a bastard, just a scared, unsure kid who, by the end of the novel, looks like he might actually be quite a catch when he's 28. Although Sam slips up on the first step, he gets right up, starts climbing again (albeit thanks to some prodding), and will probably reach the top of the stairs ... some day.
