Have you been good? (How to be good - Nick Hornby)

Member Name: west_jenn

Product:	How to be good - Nick Hornby
Date:	03/10/01 (321 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: funny, thought provoking

Disadvantages: can't think of any

If you're already a Nick Hornby fan you'll love this book. It's very funny and had me nodding in recognition in a lot of places. I found it compulsive reading and hard to put down. It's a humorous and insightful look into a liberal, middle class family's values, problems and what happens when a you put a borderline mad new age healer into the equation.

Katie Carr's marriage to David is close to breaking point, there is no big dramatic reason. Somewhere in the middle of twenty years of marriage, two children and Katie's demanding job as a GP they have grown apart.

David is the cynical grumpy writer of 'Angriest man in Holloway' a column in the local paper where he moans about everything that annoys him, which includes mostly everything. Katie is having an affair, she figures that being a doctor scores highly on the goodness scale so an affair will just knock some of her points of rather than making her bad.

Life is changed forever when Goodnews makes an appearance. Goodnews is the new age healer David goes to see to cure his bad back. David is only there to annoy his wife, but gets a 'road to Damascus' struck by lightning spiritual conversion as well as a cured back.

To begin with Katie fears for his health, so great is the change. He is happy, joyful, full of a desire to change the world and scares the children by cheerful conversation at breakfast.

Goodnews comes to live with them and becomes a guru in their midst with turtle eyebrow brooches. David and eight year old Molly are devoted disciples. Katie and ten year old Tom are the cynical voices of reason. To Katie it feels more like being a 'moaning, spoiled, smug, couldn't care a less survival of he fittest tabloid journalist'.

David and Goodnews launch a scheme to get the neighbours to have homeless kids to stay for a year. Katie objects that people have a right not to have strangers staying in thei
r house and that this is understandable. She also states that it is weird to get the kids to give away their toys, another one of their projects.

But Goodnews believes that if people are hungry they should be fed, if they are homeless give them a room, that there is no reason why they can't save the world and love everyone. Katie in theory can't fault some of their arguments, she is after all a life long liberal thinking guardian reader but a little voice in her head thinks 'no that is not how the real world works' She finds her husband smug, sanctimonious, and humourless she misses his once complicated mind.

Molly is a daddy's girl who sees the new status quo as a chance to bond with her dad. Katie is beginning to guiltily think her daughter is turning into a prig. Whilst their strange domestic set up is leading Tom to misbehave at school. She fears that her children will be turned into weirdos by their father's infleunce.

Katie feels driven insane by their constant peace, love, save the world philosophy and wants to enjoy big macs and expensive cocktails without being reminded of the world's poor. Her original marital problems are still bubbling beneath the surface and have been made worse by David's complete personality change. Something has to give either she leaves, waits a long time and hopes David will change, or joins in with what she can't beat.

Katie's reaction to her husband and co is often funny because their idealism brings out the cynical ironic side of her character i.e when David earnestly compares his plans to Julia Robert?s fight against an evil water company in Erin Brokovech and Katie asks him if he's seriously suggesting that he is Julia Roberts. I laughed at her embarrassment during the party David hosts to get the neighbours to take in the homeless, because I could imagine how I would cringe if my other half decided to preach to the neighbours about hel
ping the homeless.

This book raises some complex questions about what it means to be good. David and Goodnews want people to give a lot of their income away to help the poor, and this sound good as do a lot of their ideas to help the homeless. Katie is quite ambivalent about a lot of what they say she believes it at one level, but on another level feels she is having enough trouble holding herself and family together to make such a commitment to saving the world. So does this mean that Katie is not good she works hard as a GP but doesn't want to come home and live/breathe the problems of the world. Or does it mean that she is human and like most people in the world?

Summary: