“An ideal world in my own home…I’m not yet sure why the prospect appalls me so much, but I do know somewhere in me that GoodNews is wrong, that a life without hatred is no life at all, and that my children should be allowed to despise whom they like. Now, there’s a right worth fighting for.”
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to assume less and less often that someone who has done something that has unpleasant effects for me is doing it out of malice. Sure, some people do mean things just for the joy of causing other people misery. But not most people. Most people are doing their best and just trying to get by. The answer to why someone would do something like that (whatever that may be) seems to most often be laziness, or incompetence.
I’m sure Snidely Whiplash-style villains exist out there, rubbing their hands together and cackling with nefarious glee when their plans come to fruition. Almost everyone else, though, likes to think of themselves as good. Flawed, perhaps, but good at their core. Katie Carr, in Nick Hornby’s How To Be Good, certainly considers herself that way. After all, she’s a doctor who helps people! And she’s certainly better than her husband, David, the self-appointed “Angriest Man In Holloway”…at least, until she lets her long-running dissatisfaction with her home life boil over into an affair with a colleague. But out of the blue, David suddenly lets go of his negativity. He’s met a spiritual mentor, DJ GoodNews, and he’s ready to be a different person. A better one.
David isn’t trying to be a good person as in smiling more and being less snappy. He’s trying to be a good person in a “give your possessions to charity, take in the needy” sense. The children complain when they take away their toys, and DJ GoodNews has soon taken up residence in their spare room. And soon he’s encouraging their neighbors to do the same! In the face of David’s changing attitude towards the world, Katie is placed in the uncomfortable position of having to think about her own shortcomings as a person and decide whether she and this new version of David are any more right for each other than she and the old David were.
At his best, Nick Hornby writes flawed characters that he presents with sympathetic humor, letting their foibles play out against each other. Unfortunately, this book is not among his best. Katie feels all-too-real, as a character: a busy professional who has found herself ground down into an unhappy version of herself by the demands of her job and her home life (though her repeated insistence that she’s a good person because she’s a doctor eventually wears a little thin). But she’s not given much to do but be reactive to David, who is much less convincingly rendered. It’s difficult to believe that someone long-steeped in resentment would suddenly fall under the spell of a woowoo type, yet this is exactly what we’re meant to take at face value.
The novel’s conflict is rooted in whether Katie can remain with her family with this “new” David, and it’s just not enough to sustain an entire book. The same baseline situational setup recurs over and over again, which loses a lot of steam by the time the end comes around. It’s not a bad book, Hornby is too talented a writer and it has its moments of both amusement and pathos, but it’s a mediocre one. I wouldn’t affirmatively recommend this for anyone except a Hornby completionist. Otherwise, seek out his better efforts, like About A Boy or High Fidelity.
