Rob likes his lists, his top five lists to be specific. High Fidelity introduces us to Rob as he lists out his top five most memorable split ups following his most recently break up from Laura, who he spends the whole book obsessing over. Rob owns a record shop, a shitty flat and doesn’t have much in the way of joy or prospects. In this book he sets out to find out why he has been rejected in the past and why we choose to share our lives with the people we do.
I really wanted to love this more than I did. The atmosphere, the love of music, the 90s essence seeping off the pages, it was all there. But my GOD I don’t think I’ve ever finished a book where I hated the main character quite so much. For someone who is obsessed with women, he really seems to hate them. Rob does nothing but whine and moan and have zero self awareness which you might think would work well if he was redeemable, if along the journey of the book he learnt some grand lesson about himself, but he really doesn’t. Verging on incel territory, Rob things the world is made for him and the women in his life revolve around him. He is so deeply self-centred and moronic in his decisions that he made me want to scream at the page a fair few times.
He talks about how he ‘could rescue them. I could redeem them’ in response to his dream fictional women. He sees himself as a saviour whilst actually being entirely unappealing and narrow minded. The blatant sexism from Rob with lines like ‘why are people – let’s face it, women – like this?’ shows he has zero understanding of women and seems to basing his personality off of stereotypes and cliches. Hornby has done an incredibly good job at creating a character so deeply dislikable I wonder how anyone in the book can bear him.
My rage about Rob aside, I found myself noting down a few lines from this, it definitely made me laugh, I liked the writing style and I found the lists fun when they popped up every now and again, I enjoyed the passion for music in the pages, especially getting to see interactions in the record shop. Seeing Rob’s internal monologue was a fun way to digest the plot, especially with the text reflecting his chaotic through process at times, but the overall concept just felt draining. The parts I loved about this book weren’t as plentiful in the plot as the morose muttering of our lovely Rob. It’s scraped a 3.5 star for me because of the atmosphere and overall writing, but I needed more than Rob’s self deprecating narrative of lusting over everything that wasn’t, and shouldn’t be, his.
This kind of character archetype works in a show like Black Books (amazing show, highly recommend), but maybe the intimacy of reading this felt too close to such a negative character, I was happy to be able to say goodbye to him. I know I said my rage about Rob aside, but I really am done now.
