"When we played a college town, and we walked in front of a crowd like this, I knew we were going to have a hard time. They don't like real music, these people. They don't the Ramones or the Temptations or the 'Mats; they like DJ Bleepy and his stupid fucking bleeps."

And you're happy you're reading a Nick Hornby novel…

"Or else they all pretend that they're fucking gangstas, and listen to hip-hop about hos and guns."

…until Sasha Frere-Jones comes to mind and reminds you it's not Hornby's best work. Even with some plausible Marah references.

A Long Way Down, this afternoon's reading, is a topsy-turvy mess of Hornby settling to write below The Sound and the Fury — as they said in the reviews, even in the book's four voices, the rock and rattle is still his — but succeeding in hitting the corners of loneliness in experience. The yelps for help vary as much as the flip side, the ignorant restraint, and you wait for the scene to come together in a mid-point, maybe three-quarters of the way, like the instant after an unexpected sentence in a conversation, awkward until this moment:

Her face looked different now. It was having to do things it wasn't used to doing, because she suddenly looked so desperate to hear what I had to say. I don't think she was used to listening properly. I liked maked her face do something new, and that was why I went on, partly.

In the best of Hornby's strokes, there's a generous acceptance of feeling. He forgets it sometimes when it doesn't suit his interests, but when it shows, you can extrapolate for the rest. The generosity is internal, within the person, letting a mix of feelings come and go and freely, publicly, still-internally contradict themselves. The range of emotion gets a harping sometimes for its sentimentality, but that's only if you don't accept some feelings as failures.

Someone else could call the situation relativistic. Except you haven't done anything yet. And judging a few of the thoughts in other people's heads is only worth so much time. Tossing around all their thoughts is another matter, often impossible. If we're going to work shorter, and we often have to, we have to weight what we don't know.

That kind of partial and challenging understanding comes at the heart of a piece in the current New Yorker, a printing of novelist Orhan Pamuk's Nobel lecture. The weighting, filtered at both ends, is summoned openly as the story begins. Pamuk's father brings him a suitcase of his writings and sets it in a corner.

For several days after that, I walked back and forth past the suitcase without ever actually touching it. I was already familiar with this small black leather case, with a lock and rounded corners. When I was a child, my father had taken it with him on short trips and had sometimes used it to carry documents to work. Whenever he came home from a trip, I'd rush to open this little suitcase and rummage through his things, savoring the scent of cologne and foreign countries. The suitcase was a friend, a powerful reminder of my past, but now I couldn't even touch it. Why? No doubt because of the mysterious weight of its contents.

I am now going to speak of the meaning of that weight: that weight is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room and sits down at a table or retires to a corner to express his thoughts — that is, the weight of literature.

I won't quote more for you now. It's online here. You need to see the expression for yourself. But in reading the magazine this year, issue after issue as you know, keeping up with their arrivals a little better than in the past, I think the piece is my favorite from the year. Or at least top five.

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