Hornby: The suicide club photo: Steven Hyde A Long Way Down By Nick Hornby Riverhead Books, 333 pp., $24.95 more books most popular most commented A G.I.'s Strange War Tale by Sean Gardiner Horacio Castellanos Moya Does the Twisted by Jed Lipinski The 2008 New Yorker Cartoon Standings by BRIAN PARKS Sasa Stanisic Turns Gruesome History Beautiful by Sidra Durst Rivka Galchen's Twisty Mistaken Identities by zach baron Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (15) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

The problem, of course, with having your finger on the pulse of pop culture is that the pulse changes so quickly. The references to movies and rock singers in his novels High Fidelity and About a Boy already seem a bit dated, and given his apparent crankiness with rap and other recent musical subgenres, it might be time for Hornby and some of his characters to do a little growing up.

As readers of A Long Way Down, perhaps the funniest and most exhilarating novel ever written about group suicide, will be delighted to learn, this isn't a problem. The title refers to a suicide jump from the roof of a building known as Toppers' House, where four characters, three English and one American, have come on New Year's Eve to commit suicide. Martin, a former television personality, watches his career go down in flames with the disclosure of his affair with a 15-year-old girl; Jess is the burned-out daughter of a minor government official; a failed American rocker, J.J. finds Britain a convenient place to mope; and Maureen, a middle-aged single mother, fights depression from caring for her disabled son. All of them—likable middle-class self-absorbed misfits—are recognizable as types to readers of Hornby's previous four novels. Hornby allows each his or her fair share of humanity and humor. Maureen, for instance, wants to jump off the building holding a copy of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, "[n]ot only because it would have been kinda' cool, and would've added a little mystique to my death, but because it might have been a good way of getting more people to read it."

There will be objections that Hornby's characters are a bit too eloquent and witty to be typical suicides, but after all, they are characters in a novel and, more than that, characters in a Nick Hornby novel. As such, there's no reason to think that they would off themselves—or decide not to—before getting in some incisive and highly quotable verbal licks. Only a cynic would not see A Long Way Down as a long way up from much modern fiction, which seems to have been written to supply us with reasons to jump.