But it also had a desperate, careering quality, along with an escalating sense of loneliness and dread. He had to be terrified into it, and the pace of his progress was grueling. A couple of times I felt like throwing the book into the air and screaming. Evolve or be miserably stunted forever. I blame this on the current vogue for narration, once regarded by moviemakers as a no-no and now considered de rigueur .
Narration can be helpful, of course.
The upshot is that movies are turning into slide shows with commentary, and they're arm's-length experiences. High Fidelity is full of sensational, Hornby-derived lines, but they don't always fall easily on the ear. Take the novel's prologue, in which the narrator, Rob, tells his freshly departed girlfriend, Laura, that she hasn't made the list of his top five most devastating breakups. The acid in that sentiment nearly eats through the page, but in the movie it gets shouted out of a window at the fleeing lover, and it sounds too literary, too obviously facetious not something someone would scream in the heat of the moment. Worse, it suggests that the hero is a hysteric from the outset.