Warning: this book makes you THINK! (How to be good - Nick Hornby)

Member Name: ShoppingGirl

Product:	How to be good - Nick Hornby
Date:	21/08/01 (426 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Deep, funny, intelligent, thought provoking.

Disadvantages: DJ Goodnews will grate on your nerves, and there are some dodgy cultural references.

Hornby's back! And readers, get this. This time he's wearing high heels and mascara - would you Adam and Eve it?!

If like me you already love this mans work, you will no doubt be champing at the bit to read his latest. Well, I have no patience. I got the damn thing from my book club and was unable to delay the gratification - ripping through it, eyes aching, in three nights.

(Note: I can *only* read in bed. Don't ask why.)

So, what are we expecting here? Well, if you've read his other stuff, you'd be forgiven for thinking this may be another journey into the psyche of the middle class North London lad/bloke/man - with humourous insights into relationships, popular culture etc thrown in for good measure. Well, it kind of is and it kind of isn't.

This book is narrated by a woman. Yes, a *woman*! Katie Carr is our heroine - she's a disaffected GP, who does have kids and a husband but who sounds quite frankly like she could happily live without the lot of them. And she sounds suspiciously like Nick Hornby. OK, maybe Nick Hornby in a bad wig, or with a slightly high voice, but Nick Hornby is so unmistakeably providing the voice of this woman, it's a wee bit hard to visualise her (I used Haydn Gwynne from Peak Practice as my imagined Katie - it helped me a lot).

Katie doesn't talk about the things normal women do in books. She never mentions any of her friends, for instance. She is clumsy and embarrassed when describing sex - and given that she has an affair in this book, that's a wee bit of a problem. She doesn't appear to have any tender feelings towards her children, and she makes no reference *whatsoever* to her own appearance - so we're left with characters from bland tv shows to fill in the blanks. And yet... everything she says - every observation, every caustic comment - leaves us gasping with total recognition.

Reading this book was sooo intensely personal for m
e. Two reasons: Katie's 'angry marriage' and her husband David's 'politically correct re-awakening'. I'll do them in order.

OK: have you ever had a relationship where you actually end up hating your partner, and effectively waging war on each other? Well, I have. And I suspect millions of others have too, or else this story came from nowhere. The heavy silences, the loaded questions, the veiled accusations - the blatant insults. Katie comes home a day early from her two-day conference. David greets her with, 'what, you talked crap at twice the normal speed?'

I recognised every word of this - and laughed out loud at most of their conversations. Everybody out there who has ever been involved with a bitter, cynical, angry and frustrated partner will know what I mean. Why not leave, then? I hear you ask. Well, I did eventually, and Katie's pretty near to it too as this story gathers pace.

But Katie is forced to re-assess the old, angry, bitter husband she has come to secretly (and not so secretly) loathe.

At this point readers, it may be best if you just suspend all your usual criteria for what is and isn't realistic. Being faith-healed by a man called DJ Goodnews, bringing him to live in your house, and undergoing a fundamental personality change because of it may not look like a very believeable thing for David to do. I'm with you on this one, but hey, we need a story so let's run with it!

It is this transformation, and poor Katie's struggle do deal with it that gave me the strongest shivers of recognition. That was *my* childhood. Yup, I was brought up by middle class liberals who thought that pretty much everything kids like to do was some form of 'sin' against all the poor, the oppressed and the impoverished masses in the world.

In my house, it wasn't enough to donate to Oxfam, or to do a sponsored walk for the elderly. We were made to face up
to the worlds inequalities much closer to home. One year, my mum told us all she didn't want any Christmas presents - we were to give the money to the starving in Africa. And all of this was on top of the fact that almost everything we wanted to watch on TV was frowned upon - on grounds of sexism, racism, fascism, or whatever 'ism' was that weeks cause of choice.

For this reason, I found myself identifying most with Katie's son Tom, who simply can't get his head round why his dad had given away his Playstation to some disadvantaged kids. I felt I was there with him as he asked (quite rightly) 'but why do *we* have to give our stuff away?' Why us?

This really made me think. Where does charity begin - and who deserves our charity? Our kids? Our neighbours kids? Some poorer kids we have never met? Or do we go the whole hog like David, and ask random homeless people to come and live in our houses?

I wrestled with this a bit, but kept coming down on Katie's side. As the breadwinner (David was too busy writing down 'How to be Good' he didn't actually have a job) shouldn't she have had more of a say about how her salary was spent? Hornby plots this nicely, by giving David an opportunity to be very forgiving about Katie's affair - depriving her of the chance to really get mad at him, and his increasing smugness. Not fair, I cried! If it was my bloke giving away my kids toys I would tell him to shape up or ship out - as would most women I suspect.

The plot counts for little in this book - there's not much of it, and what there is develops pretty slowly. This book is about characters and their interactions. Family life, middle class relationships, popular culture in Britain in the noughties - it's all here for us to think and ponder over. And we may all ask ourselves - are we *good* people? And who gets to define what that is anyway?
It's thought provoking stuff.
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br>Hornby's trademark is his constant references to popular culture - and here they fly thick and fast. Everything from Posh 'n Becks and Ali G through to Tracy Emin and the cast of Friends gets name-checked. The kids don't just watch tv. They watch 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch' - you get the idea.

Personally, I think Hornby shoots himself in the foot with this technique. OK, we all like to hear a wee mention of somebody we're familiar with - but by cataloguing every single little cultural detail, he is putting his book into such a specific timeframe, it's dated by the time we get the book in our hands. This was a big problem for me in 'About a Boy' - where the death of Kurt Cobain was a central plot device. This book is now consigned to the 'retro' or 'nostalgia' shelf already. I know that when the action taked place, I myself was only 19 years old.

And here again, Hornby name-checks a specific song - '1, 2, 3, 4, Get with the Wicked'. Yes, that dodgy rap track that has now been long forgotten. I can't even remember who sung it - if I ever knew to begin with. Look mate - the pop charts wait for nobody. A big hit today is tomorrows embarrassment. Leave out the music references - unless they're *meant* to be dated. Your book's current relevance is depreciating daily because of it!

OK, this is a minor gripe. I've given this book five stars. It deserves more - it's painfully funny, it's thought provoking and the dialogue throughout is utterly priceless.

I can't wait to read it again - I'll give it a couple of months and then rediscover it.

This book represents Nick Hornby at his brilliant, intelligent best. Damn, he's *GOOD*!

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