High Fidelity (Or Why a Humble Record Collector is an Oxymoron)
So, you’re a 35-year-old record collector, who also happens to own a shop and sells records for a living. You start your day with music, and the rest of your day, you criticize your customers, who ask for cliched records by The Beatles, Stones, and all the mainstream artists. Why? Perhaps only one answer. Because you take a little lot too much pride in collecting records — works of famous strangers, triumphing over life — and knowing the names of artists that are obscured by the mainstream artists, who happen to be icons and more pleasurable than the ones who come up with records that are biting the dust in your shop. Clearly, you’re a music snob, and lo and behold, you have started taking pride in being that because there is nothing else left in your life. Lester Bangs might approve of it, but what about the readers? Perhaps, they might find you funny or cute.
Nick Hornby, in the way of an almost autobiographical confession, takes you through the romantic mishaps of the protagonist, Rob — a snobbish record collector, who has fallen in love just a little too many times than his inclination to music might have allowed him, if only he had taken the effort to learn an instrument.
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Written in an almost arrogant tone, and suitably so, and a prose that reads as smooth as butter, High Fidelity depicts, through a stinging satire with a tinge of accusation on men who might read it, the funniest aspects of being a single man in the early thirties and the counterintuitive perils of delving too deep into music, movies, and books, without having anything to create by yourself. It takes you through the lonely journey of the central character, who despite his age, is deprived of life’s experiences, as he successfully covers up his ignorance about life with his knowledge about rock n’ roll — pleasurable to his mates and often annoying to everyone else, including his partner, Laura, who is conspicuously closer to the reality than he is.
Despite the problematic manly attitude of the character, bordering towards toxicity, there is indeed something endearing about Rob, who has refused to learn from his mistakes and lead a life around music — fall in love with new girls merely by listening to a verse and dedicating to her, using the sound of music as succor to all his pains and miseries (which wouldn’t have existed had he not made the music the center of his life and worked on something “prudent”), and by doing everything, not playing to the crowd but being himself — likeable or not, he doesn’t care or at least pretends well to be not caring about it. Well, that’s what rock n’ roll teaches you.
High Fidelity, with its highly flawed protagonist, is still a work of hope and a tribute to the meditative healing power of music in one’s life. Most importantly, it remains a bittersweet comedy of love and despair, which makes the central character laughable and the novel contemplative at the same time.
