One New Year's Eve, four people with very different reasons but a common purpose find their way to the top of a 15-story building in London. None of them has calculated that, on a date humans favor for acts of significance, in a place known as a local suicide-jumpers' favorite, they might encounter company. ''A Long Way Down'' is the story of what happens next, and of what doesn't.
This is Hornby's fourth novel. The two books that established his name -- ''Fever Pitch,'' a memoir of his obsession with the London soccer team Arsenal, and his first novel, ''High Fidelity,'' about a pop music obsessive named Rob who mediates his messy relationship with the world through his record collection -- were loved for their precise, wry understanding of a certain kind of modestly privileged, emotionally clumsy heterosexual white 30-something male. The notion that the behavior, thought processes and manners of such people had been previously neglected in contemporary writing appears absurd, but Hornby made it seem so; he skillfully pinpointed habits and emotional foibles that felt hitherto undescribed but true.
In no way is it to belittle those insights to note that Hornby might not have had to search too far afield for them. ''Fever Pitch'' was about him, and though ''High Fidelity'' was a novel, much of Rob's view of the world, and in particular his relationship with music, clearly drew from Hornby's. (Rob's memorable discourse on the significance of how you order your record collection, for instance, directly echoed a piece of journalism Hornby had written on the same subject several years earlier, and it is not a great leap from Rob's endless list-making to ''Songbook,'' Hornby's 2003 volume of essays about 31 beloved songs.)
It might have been easy for Hornby to continue in this vein, methodically mining his obsessions as fuel for further books documenting the different facets and evolution of Hornby-man, but he has been more ambitious than that. His second novel, ''About a Boy,'' was largely from the point of view of the 12-year-old referred to in its title; the next, ''How to Be Good,'' was narrated by a female doctor whose husband is overtaken by an eccentric spiritual fervor. Now comes ''A Long Way Down'' -- that rare and unexpected creature, a playful novel about suicide.
Still, as Hornby's orbit has widened, perhaps his deeper subject hasn't changed so much after all. One of Hornby's strengths is his sharp sense of how completely the small idiocies and preoccupations of our lives are entwined with the big, serious stuff. If his earlier books focused on that equation from one side -- how the way you feel about the B-side of a favorite single, say, or a tepid performance by your sports team, has life and death and love and the rest wrapped up and channeled within it -- his latest suggest the corollary: that it would be absurd to expect, when matters of life and death are in play, that the lame jokes and sloppy thinking and inappropriate cares of everyday living should somehow recede.
''A Long Way Down'' is narrated by the voices of the four would-be suicides. Martin is the well-known presenter of a morning TV show, recently disgraced and imprisoned after having sex with a 15-year-old girl. Maureen is an unworldly single mother who feels imprisoned by caring for a son who can neither speak nor walk nor recognize her, the product of her only sexual encounter. Jess is a snotty, unrestrained 18-year-old girl with a politician father and a missing older sister. JJ is a failed American musician who delivers pizza, quotes Raymond Carver, Oscar Wilde and Bob Dylan to people who won't spot the references, claims to be suffering from a fatal disease he names CCR because it's an acronym for the band Creedence Clearwater Revival and entertains the delusion that if he leaps with a copy of Richard Yates's 1961 novel, ''Revolutionary Road,'' in his arms, his death might bring it a wider readership. From the beginning, without shortchanging the seriousness of his characters' predicaments, Hornby permits himself to find uncomfortable comedy in their situation. Suicide is usually a solitary act -- the way it is typically done, you start with one person and then chip away at the numbers from there. Maureen and Martin are the first to discover they are not alone. She taps him on the shoulder. (''I only wanted to ask him if he was going to be long,'' she explains to the reader.) Their subsequent conversation, an awkward one, gives a fair sense of the book's tone:
'' 'I'll wait until . . . Well, I'll wait.'
'' 'So you're just going to stand there and watch?'
'' 'No. Of course not. You'll be wanting to do it on your own, I'd imagine.'
'' 'You'd imagine right.'
'' 'I'll go over there.' She gestured to the other side of the roof.
'' 'I'll give you a shout on the way down.' ''
You can imagine this scene getting a good, uneasy laugh if they ever make the movie. (This seems quite likely. ''High Fidelity'' and ''About a Boy'' were both successfully filmed, and there have already been two movie versions of ''Fever Pitch''; the second -- transposed almost unrecognizably into a world of the Boston Red Sox, Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon -- came out this year.) I guess some people will be offended at any proximity of humor to the act of suicide, but maybe that is precisely Hornby's risky point: that suicide isn't always very deep at all, or at least no more or less deep than the living that leads to it; that it is just as much the province of shallow motives and poor jokes as the rest of life. (Why should this surprise us? Even if suicide is the most serious decision a person can make, isn't it also, in its very essence, a supreme act of taking life lightly?)
At its heart, ''A Long Way Down'' isn't really about suicide itself anyway. All four principal characters come down from the rooftop together and alive -- at least on that first evening. It's more about what happens when you don't kill yourself, and the tale Hornby subsequently tells is an unusual and unpredictable one. The book begins with an epigraph from the novelist Elizabeth McCracken -- ''The cure for unhappiness is happiness, I don't care what anyone says'' -- but in what follows Hornby doesn't confuse the simplicity of this thought with the impossibility of sometimes living it. For all his light touches, he is never superficial enough to suggest that these lives that have fallen apart, in four of the millions of ways lives may do so, can easily be patched up and renewed. Whatever limited consolations the book's survivors find in each other, Hornby resists melodramatic resolutions or glorious moments of redemption, and he doesn't smuggle away or refute all the reasons his characters took with them to the rooftop where they met, the ones that urged them toward the edge rather than down to the ground the slow way, back into the world.
If, as a result, there's a sort of aimlessness as the book tapers toward its end, maybe it is the price of Hornby's refusal to offer either cheap, grand, sentimental reasons to choose life or a retreat into a lazy bleakness, a wallowing in the pointlessness of it all. It's as though he is fairly certain that life is worth living but can't quite find the ways to show it, or to prove it. But that, I suppose, is not his predicament alone.