During an otherwise provocative post on Fight Club, Amanda offers up a fairly serious misreading of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. She characterizes Laura, Rob's ex-girlfriend, as representing adulthood by being dull. Where they met as 24-hour party people, she's now a lawyer. Where Rob clings to his rundown record store and dingy flat, she's begun transitioning out of young adulthood and into a more affluent, traditionally professional lifestyle. Where Rob lacks direction, she's found success. Laura, Amanda writes, has "one major quality, which is that she’s dull." This makes the book "not only lazy and sexist, it ends up concealing the very real struggle to get by in the capitalist system that is the genuine source of the modern man’s (and woman’s) malaise."
Not to sure about that last, but whether capitalism births boredom strikes me as a thornier issue than I feel like engaging at 1 in the morning. Mischaracterizations of one of my favorite books, however, cannot go unchallenged. Laura may be dull, but Rob is duller. She, remember, rejected him. She broke up with his ass and shacked up with the cosmopolitan peacenik who lived nearby. She recreates the club he DJ'd at to give him a kickstart, offering him a rare chance at recapturing what made him interesting in the first place. She fucks him after her father's funeral. If Laura is dull, she's dull in a real way -- in the way that even the most fascinating personalities are after a couple years of cohabitation. She's rendered uninteresting not because she's a staid person -- Rob freely admits that she's smarter, kinder, better, prettier, and more successful than he is, and the book makes her out to be an infinitely more attractive partner -- but because he's familiar with her. And there's nothing diversionary or easy about taking on that dynamic.
Disney movies stop either at the cute meet or the glorious reconciliation -- High Fidelity starts after the relationship has lost its initial luster. Laura lives adulthood, but she represents commitment, monogamy. What's scary about her is that she isn't dull, it's that she's a good bet, that she's likely the best Rob will ever do. But accepting the better life she offers means sacrificing the higher highs and lower lows of singlehood. And that's hard to do. I know plenty of young adults who struggle mightily with exactly that choice, and taking it seriously isn't cowardice in the face of capitalism. Indeed, if Amanda, as she suggests, thinks an alternative economic model would solve the tradeoffs inherent in monogamy (or other arrangements), I fear she'll be rapidly and fully disappointed.
