Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is a fairly sexist, mostly uninteresting story about being middle-aged and unmarried

• Rob gets dumped by his girlfriend and it makes him sad.
• It makes him think of all of the other girls who've dumped him over the years.
• He goes to find them for absolution.
• It makes him sad.
• Then his ex-girlfriend gets back with him because being complacent and mostly contented is easier than being sad.

Like Brave New World, this novel is set in London. The characters and places in this book are stereotypes from London. Rob owns a small and pokey, snobby record store. None of this is really interesting. The good part of the book is the start where he goes through all of the girls who broke up with him. The rest of the book is basically him floundering around in middle-aged emotion. Middle-aged emotion brings to mind Gavin McInnes' views on people over thirty wearing band t-shirts: Who cares?

Perhaps I'm being unfair. Middle-aged people care about middle-aged emotion. My parents are middle-aged and I care about how they feel but this feeling doesn't extend to characters in shitty novels, sadly. This hardly extends further than my immediate family.

Read this book if you are desperate.

Written by: Zach.
Tags: books, high fidelity, literary criticism, nick hornby.