How to Be Good

I had been eagerly anticipating the new Nick Hornby novel, How to Be Good. I’ve found his previous books to be pertinent to my generation in a gentle, funny, and unpretentious manner. High Fidelity and About a Boy were engaging and gave an insight into the way men think and feel. I was particularly interested to see how Hornby would handle a female narrator — I wasn’t wholly disappointed. Katie is mother to two children. Though I can't empathize with disliking one's children, I can presume that this is something that a mother might feel. I’m also willing to concede that some women would put up with only having one girlfriend, even if she is so self-involved that she doesn’t hear when Katie is confiding an extramarital affair. However, the essential premise on which this novel rests is that Katie cannot seem to leave her utterly objectionable husband David — which is precisely what gave me so much trouble.

At the beginning of the novel Katie asks for a divorce from this man who is so consistently angry that his torrent of vitriol earns him a column called "The Angriest Man in Holloway." Thus commences David’s campaign to be "good" — to give away money and his children’s toys, house the homeless under his roof (and the roofs of his neighbors), and write a guide on how to be good, all with the aid of his "spiritual healer," GoodNews. Hornby's polarization of bad (selfish, greedy, self-righteous) to good (selfish, smug, sanctimonious, and, the biggest crime, humorless), is perhaps intended ironically. But it results in a profoundly depressing book in which ennui and settling — settling for anything so as not to be alone — is essentially the only solution.

Dissatisfaction and guilt plague Katie and yet, even as the protagonist, it is not she who changes as the novel progresses. David propels the action almost single-handedly; the only change that comes over Katie is ultimately one of apathy. Hornby is adept at the humorous everyday observation, and there are enough wry grins to be found here. However, where his previous narrators have been hapless but not altogether hopeless, here Hornby is saying "There are no happy endings, there is just making do." Where Rob Fleming's (High Fidelity) progress is coming to terms with what it means to commit to a relationship, Katie and David appear to have lived out Rob’s fears of what that commitment may lead to. He was right to be afraid!

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