The 25 Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years
19. Rob Gordon- High Fidelity

You can tell a lot about a man’s age and relationships from his dedication to pop culture. My dad finds fulfillment through his work and watches TV when he has time for such diversions. I see work as a nuisance keeping me from seeing a movie on opening day. My dad compares female characters to his wife. I compare my wife to Annie Hall. Or at least the Japanese girl who mailed Rivers Cuomo stationery. (Men younger than me don’t have wives. They’re too busy playing video games.)

Rob Gordon is the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s luminous 1995 novel High Fidelity, and in this way he’s a man without a country. He’s between my dad and me in age, and his work—running Championship Vinyl—is pop culture. He is understandably conflicted. On one hand, he can’t help but view the world through the artificial walls he has built around himself. On the other hand, he’s lived long enough to know how trapped he is by those walls.

Nick Hornby’s writing is always candid and astute and loving, but, re-reading the novel, it’s surprising how isolated and morose Rob is. In the introduction he reflects: “What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all of those records turn you into a melancholy person?”

Music is Rob Gordon’s life, and Rob Gordon’s life sucks. So does music suck? These are questions he should have faced before his mid-thirties, but that lack of awareness is what makes him so iconic. He believes that everything can be summed up by outside influences, and he avoids internal conflicts until he is forced to confront them. He believes that wanting Aretha Franklin’s “Angel” played at his funeral says everything about him. And it does—more than he even knows. Gordon is one of the most representative characters of Generation X, a group of people raised with and defined by irony, but he doesn’t sense irony when describing himself. How ironic.

While the film adaptation is more propulsive, the bulk of the novel is an inventory of the past. Gordon, starting at what ruined his union with Laura, looks back at all of his relationships to see where he went wrong. What he finds is that he never went right. His story is a journey from being self-involved to being introspective.

That journey is not a sea change. Compare the gradual differences in this final speech to the opening:

“Just because it’s a relationship, and it’s based on soppy stuff, it doesn’t mean you can’t make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you’ll never get anywhere. That’s where I’ve been going wrong. I’ve been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself.”

By the end of the novel, Gordon’s voice hasn’t changed all that much from its digressive, overwhelmed, capricious tone at the beginning. He obviously has a long way to go, but he has the answers to some of his earlier questions. He didn’t have problems with women; they had problems with him.