Nick Hornby corresponds to no brow – high, low, or middle – exactly, but he can be disarmingly specific about his place in the republic of letters. He made his name in the UK with a football memoir, “Fever Pitch,” which inaugurated his role in “lad lit,” a very English answer to “chick lit.” Mr. Hornby himself, however, translates well, and the movie version of his novel “High Fidelity” made him a darling of music-obsessed American hipsters.

His new novel, “A Long Way Down” (Riverhead, 333 pages, $24.95), is high concept. Four very different characters, telling their story in four different voices, show up on New Year’s Eve at a famous suicide spot, Toppers’ House. Mutually embarrassed, none of them goes through with it, and they form an ad hoc “Breakfast Club”-style support group. To the reader who enjoys Mr. Hornby’s lightheartedness, none is convincingly suicidal, as the characters themselves see only much later. Mr. Hornby is not trawling the psychological depths. That might be too literary.

Each of the four characters resembles an aspect of Mr. Hornby himself. The American, JJ, is a failed guitarist who asks himself, after he steps back from the edge, what song would be appropriate (“In Between Days,” by the Cure). Martin, a minor television celebrity, is the mouthpiece for Mr. Hornby’s media savvy, although Martin is primarily an “arsehole” – which Mr. Hornby, his readers would agree, is definitely not. Maureen’s life is dominated by her vegetative son; Mr. Hornby has written about his autistic son.

Only Jess, an edgy brat whose father is a junior minister of education, is quite outside Mr. Hornby’s biography, although she is very much a pop music genre piece. Her summary of the plot thus far could be an indierock manifesto: “When you’re sad – like, really sad, Toppers’ House sad – you only want to be with other people who are sad.”

Mr. Hornby overestimates the incompatibility of this foursome. In the early part of the book, their sniping is almost the only thing driving the plot, but their cooperative moments are far more engaging, as they begin to solve one another’s problems. Maureen, once jilted by her vegetative son’s father, gets the chance to dress down the adolescent boy who is making Jess miserable. Maureen is far and away the best character in this book.

Mr. Hornby’s novels have always celebrated commitment; his interest in the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle puts him in a perfect position to tell stories of the end of adolescence, however prolonged. The hero of “High Fidelity” needs not only to change from vinyl to digital, he needs to face the fact that he doesn’t want to be single all his life. The characters in “A Long Way Down” have to face the fact that though they’re failures, they can learn to live with it. It’s a very good point, and impossible to argue with, but in combination with his overt lit erary modesty, Mr. Hornby’s message can seem capitulatory, a ready resort to safety.

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Mr. Hornby contributes a monthly column to the stylish American review, the Believer. Collected in “The Polysyllabic Spree” (Believer Books, 143 pages, $14), this column, “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” is before all else personable. It concerns the day-to-day life of books bought versus books read, and Mr. Hornby is pointedly aboveboard about all the little conceits of literary life. “There’s no rule that says one’s reading has to be tonally consistent,” he worries in one column. “I can’t help but feel, however, that my reading has been all over the place this month.”

This is talking shop, something not every writer can comfortably do in public. Mr. Hornby gets away with it. Although the Believer is often happily esoteric, Mr. Hornby hedges toward populism: “After a lifetime of reading,” he writes, “I can officially confirm that readers’ writers beat writers’ writers every time.” While expressing his discomfort with a slightly unbelievable stream of consciousness in a book he is reading, he jokes, “At this point, I realized with some regret that not only could I never write a literary novel, but I couldn’t even be a character in a literary novel.”

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Melissa Bank is a better writer than you may think. Her first book, “The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing,” achieved such success that it was easy for serious-minded readers to ignore. Ms. Bank’s writing is lucid, she develops her characters gradually. From the first story of her new collection, “The Wonder Spot” (Viking, 226 pages, $24.95), her skill is apparent.

A middle child, the only sister, Sophie is getting ready for a bat mitzvah she doesn’t want to have. But Sophie’s sense of humor is disingenuous and cute. “My mother told the same stories over and over – maybe twenty-five in all; if you added them up, there were only about two hours of her life that she wanted me to know about,” she says; it’s a joke too good for a 12-year-old,but too sarcastic for a grown-up narrator.

Ms. Bank too often relies on a feeling that her heroine believes life is slightly worse than it is. “As soon as I’m in a relationship,” Sophie says in a story from her adulthood, “I promote fear from clerk to president, even though all it can do is sweep up, turn off the lights, and lock the door.” This kind of self-deprecation makes for happy endings but little real humor. Ms. Bank is a talented writer and storyteller, but she has set herself no more challenge in “The Wonder Spot” than she did in “The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing.”