"Dick Lit": Reading High Fidelity.

"You really should read it. It's a great book for anyone who likes girls and music." That's my brother there, talking about Nick Hornby's High Fidelity as he shoves it into my hands.

"That would be me," I said, and took it. When I told a female friend of mine his above mentioned description she smiled a bit and said "Oh, dick lit," in the self-satisfied manner of someone who has just said something wittily accurate. I liked the term. I liked it so much that I stole it.

High Fidelity is one of my favorite movies. It's right up there with Blade Runner and Star Wars, as far as I'm concerned. John Cusack is a male role model that I admire way more than any musclebound action star. I've never wanted to be Arnie or Bruce Willis. Not really. I have, though, wanted to be John Cusack, and I think that High Fidelity had a lot to do with that. Also Better Off Dead. That one's good, too.

So, I love the movie. I am firmly in the "I like girls and music demographic," and love having my interests spoken to. Some years ago, a day or so after I broke up with a long-term girlfriend, I popped in the DVD and got ready for a good wallow. About a third of the way through the movie, the phone rang and I answered. A friend asked me what I was doing, how I was dealing with the breakup. "I'm drinking a bottle of wine and watching High Fidelity," I said.

A pause. "That," he said, "is the saddest thing I've ever heard." I laughed my head off when he said that. He knew what I was doing, why I was watching it. He'd also been there, and knew exactly what to say to make me laugh. So, I really like this movie- I like it because it empathizes with all sorts of anxieties and desires that I've recognized in myself, and because it describes this perfect little hipster fantasy world- one where you can have a cool little LP store in a big city, hang out with music geeks like yourself, go to shows, and have sex with sultry singers and snappy lawyer chicks. It's as appealing a fantasy as anything out of sci-fi.

So, anyway, I've got heaps of affection for the movie, and for that very reason avoided the book for quite sometime. In a sort of inversion of usual convention, I decided that I didn't want the book to spoil the movie for me.

But it didn't. The book isn't that bad. In fact, it's pretty good.

The book and movie really aren't all that different, (the one glaring difference is that one is in England and the other the States) and it seems like big swathes of the book were just cut out of the text and pasted into the screenplay. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but it did constantly bring John Cusack and Jack Black to mind. I'd gotten so used to those actors speaking those lines, that I couldn't help but summon their mental image when I was reading the book.

There are several places where the book is more detailed, which is nice, particularly in the character of Marie. In the movie she just sort of shows up, Rob sleeps with her, and that's about it. She's actually fleshed out in the book, and the scene where Rob sleeps with her is great because, like the rest of the story, it's anxiety-laden in a very familiar way. I found myself nodding "uh-huh... uh-huh..." to the various dilemmas that Rob encountered and invented for himself, and rooting for him when he solved them.

Which is why I liked High Fidelity so much to begin with, and why I was so pleased with the book. Rob is a likable protagonist because his problems, hang-ups, and issues are so real-seeming. He's also likable, though, because he doesn't really wallow in them. He thinks things out and solves his problems, he has a method to things and takes action to better himself, which is great. It's a sort of emotional Horatio Alger story- the protagonist starts off really depressed, pulls himself up by his mental bootstraps, and gets happy.

So, yeah. That's about it. The book of High Fidelity is really good, and Nick Hornby seems like a nifty, charming author, great for anyone who likes girls and music.