Nick Hornby (and why do I always think there’s an S missing from his name?) has tended to write what might be called male romance novels (High Fidelity, About a Boy), stories about men and their modern lives, all arch, somewhat comic, and, except for the power of love, empty. This time out he’s strayed a bit off that path, which is good, don’t want to get repetitive, and written about a female version of his protagonist characters. I’ve quite enjoyed his other novels but feel he didn’t quite meet the mark with How to Be Good. I don’t think it’s just the gender change, though, but more that Hornby has apparently aimed at the Great Novel target and not hit it.
The title is square on to that purpose. Katie Carr is, to the eye of anyone except herself, a good person, a doctor, a wife, a mother. Okay, she starts out by having an affair but it’s brief and she realizes she’s done the wrong thing quite soon. In any case, she is married to an angry, bitter, unloving man named David. Quite literally, his job is writing a newspaper column called “The Angriest Man in Holloway,” and he never has a good word for anyone, even former friends and family, all of whom he’s managed to drive away (not counting his wife and young children). Then he meets DJ GoodNews, a man who is called that for no good reason he can explain, who lays his hands on David and somehow cures him of all the bile.
This is the key to Hornby’s purpose, turning normality and convention upside down, prompting David and daughter Molly to question the basic premises of suburban life. Why do we have a spare bedroom? Why do some people sleep in the street? Why are some classmates slow and, well, needing a good punch? David and GoodNews plot ways to change peoples’ attitudes, holding a neighborhood party to appeal for the use of spare bedrooms to house street kids, debating details for days to be put down on paper in the book they plan to call How to Be Good.
Everyman stand-in Katie, of course, is going bonkers over her inability to reconcile the feeling that David has gone over the edge but that maybe it’s her whose lost humanity. His questions are superficially straightforward (for example, why shouldn’t everyone donate any earnings over the national average to charities?) and impossible to answer without appearing selfish or uncaring or stupid. Even though she can’t put her finger on why, she is driven to her own edge, and finally surrenders to a life that is simply lived and not understood.
So far, so good. This, though, is where Hornby leaves the Great Novel approach vector and veers off into the Land of Not Quite. There are passages along the way that had me thinking the target was in view and would be reached in due time. He is in the end, though, unable to find an ending that teaches anything, that shows us something new, or even has left his characters wiser. One thinks, after reading Katie describe her surrender, that Hornby will find his way to a meaningful ending but he doesn’t. Perhaps he should have had the ending focus on Molly and her brother Tom, or Katie’s depressed loser of a brother Mark, but he doesn’t. I would recommend either of his other novels over this one, sorry.
BillSaysThis 