I love 'High Fidelity' and monogamy!!!!!!!!

I read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity for the first time last week, although it didn’t feel like the first time because I’ve seen the movie adaptation four times. The first time I watched it at home with family when I was too young to understand (I was like, ‘wow, men suck’). The second, I watched it with my boyfriend at the time, I think. I was at this stupid age where I thought relationships were all about catching your partner up on who you were, and that getting them to read and watch everything you’ve ever loved might force them to understand what it was like to live inside your world, and that it could rescue you from making any real attempt to articulate how you actually feel about anything. (It didn’t.) The third, I watched after a break-up, having another version of that same fantasy just slightly twisted, this time imagining that if my ex had just seen this movie before we’d broken up, we’d have stayed together. The fourth time, I watched it for fun. And the same for this time.

It’s ironic because High Fidelity is a romance novel that’s leaving romance for reality. It’s about grappling with commitment, or maybe it’s more generally about growing up, and maybe that’s the same thing?

And the real big thing about growing up, and being in love, and trying to do both of those things at the same time, is that you actually have to, you know, say how you feel about things instead of dropping obscure references or coded suggestions or weird cries for help to indicate how you feel. You know, you can’t just suck the charity out of this poor person who seems to understand you uniquely forever. You actually have to help them understand you, too.

That’s the plot of the book: Rob Gordon is a loserguy who works in a record shop with no customers (its the 90s) — because he and his loserguy friends chase away all the normal, perfectly fine customers with their sour-faced, music-nerd elitism — and finds himself in a crisis when his steady girlfriend of two years breaks up with him. But it’s one of those ones where it’s also really kind of him who did the breaking up, letting it limp on so pathetically and passively that she has no choice but to dump him to retain any self-respect.

It’s a genuinely compelling, moving and accessible novel. I can hardly name an emotion I didn’t feel during it. But in three words, it’s funny, bittersweet, and honest.

It’s a story that deals with what it’s like to feel like an innocent boy who’s grown up into being trapped in a shitty man’s body faster than you even realise; of the delusions of nostalgia; how you can choose to hide behind and bury yourself in your love for art (or music in this case) or use it to actually connect. It’s also about the most wretched feelings we have about our own monogamy. Rob’s narration is so down-to-earth and well-written, he has a way of illuminating the most obscure thoughts in simple language.

Attempting to escape the pain of his breakup with Laura, he goes to a local gig and stumbles upon an attractive and talented musician, Marie LaSalle. When she sings on stage, he finds himself totally and helplessly smitten:

…I find myself in two apparently contradictory states: a) I suddenly miss Laura with a passion that has been entirely absent for the last four days, and b) I fall in love with Marie LaSalle.

Of course, the crush on Marie is a fantasy — a sexier, shinier prospect to distract him from the Laura-shaped hole in his life.

The Marie bit is easy enough to understand, then. The Laura thing takes a bit more explaining, but what it is, I think, is this: sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful all at the same time. Marie's the hopeful, forward part of it — maybe not her, necessarily, but somebody like her, somebody who can turn things around for me. (Exactly that: I always think that women are going to save me, lead me through to a better life, that they can change and redeem me.) And Laura's the backward part, the last person I loved, and when I hear those sweet, sticky acoustic guitar chords, I reinvent our time together, and, before I know it, we're in the car trying to sing the harmonies on 'Love Hurts' and getting it wrong and laughing. We never did that in real life. We never sang in the car, and we certainly never laughed when we got something wrong. This is why I shouldn't be listening to pop music at the moment.

Ugh!

Just reading it again makes me want to cry, and the fun thing about High Fidelity is that it is rife with music references that make it like an interactive experience. I put on the song referenced in this scene (‘Baby I Love Your Way’, which even Rob the narrator despises and thinks is corny), but suddenly when I put this corny song on, I also feel the pang of nostalgia that Rob feels. I’m like — Oh! Somehow, I know exactly what this breakup feels like.

I think there’s something really insightful in that shameful observation that Rob has: that sometimes you get these heart-clinching glimpses of something that feels like love, and what it really is if you were to get all clinical about it, is a divide between a yearning for the safe and familiar past, and a roaring ambition for the big wide open sky of the future. When you’re lucky, your special person feels like both of those things at once, and there’s something grounding about it.

But when you’re not so lucky, it feels like a question mark in either direction and your mind starts spinning fantasies. The point is never so much what the fantasies themselves are, but that it takes you away from whatever pain you’re really in, whatever hole you haven’t figured out how to fill, or some kind of promise that you haven’t kept with yourself.

Fantasy is so dangerous precisely because of how sweet and goopy it is; you could sit around with it hooked up to your veins all day, never having to move a muscle.

People don’t much like to say out loud that they feel their partner completes them, because it’s rightly a little politically incorrect, but I think rejecting this idea wholesale misses out on a spiritual truth in there that is kind of the sustaining force of love; that there’s something in a good partner that makes — or rather allows — you to feel somehow… infinite?

I can’t figure out a better way to say that without sounding all woo, so there you go: woo.

Maybe I think this because I’m young and I’d change my mind five years into marriage, or single or blah blah! But it is how I feel right now. And I don’t mean that this is the way you should feel about a partner all the time, because you physically can’t, just that you probably should… sometimes. I don’t know. 10% of the time? 60% of the time? On average over three years? A lot of the time, I mean!

Rob and his girlfriend are kind of shitty people, I mean in an average human way rather than an egregious immoral way, like he’s a bit of a lazy sulk who’s cynical and stuck in the past and she’s sort of a mess who sometimes is a snob and tries to force a new identity with a wardrobe or boyfriend change, which makes it all the more such a perfect study of a real relationship. Because what two perfect people could possibly get together? There isn’t any! They’d have nothing to do! Nothing to needle each other about! They get so fed up with each other and also clearly love each other.

I love this book, I love grumpy Rob, I love how he and Laura needle each other in a way no one else could do… and I love love! (Watch it!!! Read it!!! Ideally both!!!)

The other day, I confessed to B about a goofy little crush that I had because you know, long distance. And he asked to see a picture so I showed him and he was like, ‘OK, whatever! Enjoy.’ I was like, ‘What, are you serious?’ ‘Yeah. You can do whatever you like. But I’ll be here.’ and then he smiled swiped this little movie star strand of hair across his forehead, and that made me laugh, and my crush dissipated into thin air. I was like oh: okay. I’m back here. I don’t know what my future is sometimes, but as long as I’m still choosing to be here, I won’t wonder.

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