Hornby is more than good!! (How to be good - Nick Hornby)

Member Name: fizzle

Product:	How to be good - Nick Hornby
Date:	21/08/01 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Typical Hornby humour, great observations and generally great writing!

Disadvantages: Plot meanders slightly at time

Considering I have a bit of an aversion to hardback books (no room in my already jam packed handbag) I’ve been anxiously waiting for this book to come out in paperback so that I can add it to my much loved Nick Hornby collection. However I noticed the book in my local library a few days ago and couldn’t hold out any longer. I grabbed it possessively, in case there was a sudden stampede to snatch it from the shelf, and made my way to the issue desk.

If you’ve been paying attention (and I won’t blame you if you haven’t) you will have noticed that this exciting event took place a few days ago and I am already writing my review. No massive deduction (unless I am writing this without having read the thing – very naughty!) to conclude that I finished this book within a few days. A good sign you might think – must be a compulsive read!

And well yes, it was a good read – I certainly hurtled through it at a rapid pace. If you haven’t heard about the newest addition to the great Hornby canon then here’s a bit of background. This is the fourth book to be written by Hornby and one of the first things you notice is that this is no longer written from the male point of view (a viewpoint captured so well in previous Hornby novels such as High Fidelity and About a Boy).

The book is written from the viewpoint of Katie Carr, a GP who is struggling with marital problems, stress at work, a listless affair and two small children. This took a bit of adjusting to at first, the idea of Nicky Hornby writing from the feminine psyche. I’m not sure if Hornby truly manages to pull it off (ironically I’ve found previous male characters, such as Rob in High Fidelity, much easier to identify with, although this might be just an age thing as I’m not yet a mother in my thirties), but it is a refreshing departure.

The novel details the potential breakdown of Katie’s marriage an
d chiefly the life altering change in her husband David, a change which has repercussions for the whole family. David who was “previously the angriest man in Holloway” (yep fans of Hornby will see we’re on familiar geographic terrain) is now a man who has developed a frightenly acute social conscience. Where once he was cynically attacking actors, the theatre, old ladies on buses (not literally I might add) and all manner of things in his scathing newspaper column, he is now taking the family’s Sunday lunch to the homeless, giving his children’s toys away to the less fortunate and attempting to talk his entire street into putting up homeless people in their spare rooms.

This startling change is due to a chance encounter with a spiritual faith healer named GoodNews (described in the Guardian as the “vague offspring of Swampy and Raj Persaud”!). GoodNews is the catalyst for the spiritual change in David’s outlook and he ends up moving into David and Katie’s middle class home.

This is to result in difficulties for the whole of the Carr family, and Katie in particular is to become increasingly frustrated by David’s “maddening sweetness” and the plans he dreams up with GoodNews to change the world.

Although I didn’t enjoy this book as much as previous Hornby novels (to be fair, classics such as High Fidelity are a pretty hard act to follow) I would still recommend this book as a good read. The writing, as always, is superb and the characters finely observed. There are also frequent touches of typical Hornby humour. Sometimes, however, you wonder where the novel is leading as you seem caught in the frequent narrative pacing of Katie agonising about moving out, moving back home, moving out again and so forth.

With this book I found it was the peripheral characters who really brought the novel to life. There are some wonderfully sulky comments from Katie an
d David’s young son Tom, and the descriptions of Katie’s “heartsink patients” from the clinic had me smiling inanely to myself on the train. Conversely some of the passages in the novel were so poignant that they almost had me in tears.

I would consider this a more ambitious novel than Hornby’s previous books; it throws up a number of perplexing issues relating to middle class England, liberal angst, parenthood and the over riding question of “how to be good?” in today’s modern world.

Maybe a bit of a departure from previous Hornby novels but it has enough of Hornby’s great writing style and talent to make it definitely worth a look.

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