Il libro mi è stato regalato per il mio compleanno e per questo (e per il titolo: l'avete visto il titolo??) non ho potuto resistere e l'ho inserito direttamente in cima alla mia coda di lettura.

"Come diventare buoni" mi è piaciuto moltissimo: la narrazione è scorrevole e la trama talmente assurda da strappare le sue brave risate, in più la... bontà estrema, diciamo, di BuoneNuove e del "nuovo David" mi hanno permesso di utilizzare alcune perle di puro cinismo che altrimenti sarebbero rimaste immagazzinate nella mia testa: un vero spreco! (Sì, mentre leggo capita che io parli - e rida, e pianga. E insulti personaggi e/o scrittori - da sola. Non ditemi che non l'avete mai fatto anche voi!).

Il punto di Nick Hornby è semplice. Essere profondamente e assolutamente Buoni non è possibile; non è possibile applicare le opinioni generali (e suvvia, anche particolari) che abbiamo su concetti idealizzati come la Giustizia, oppure la Bontà, o la Lotta alla Povertà, e così via, perché noi - e lo so che è sconvolgente - noi, dicevo, non viviamo in un mondo idealizzato. E tuttavia farlo presente in pubblico, esternare questa incredibile deduzione, non è appropriato proprio perché generalmente queste piccole pragmatiche verità non vengono accettate.
Che viviamo immersi in una realtà profondamente umana, e quindi imperfetta, e che noi stessi siamo altrettanto profondamente umani (e dunque profondamente imperfetti) è un dato di fatto che si contrappone sempre all'assurda idea che tutto quanto sia perfettibile, senza considerare che - dato che gli individui che dovrebbero apportare tali miglioramenti sono di per sé imperfetti - ci devono essere dei limiti alla "perfettibilità" stessa dell'Universo Mondo.

...Ci sarebbe poi anche quella piccola postilla che dice che, dato che siamo umani - dunque imperfetti e vedasi righe precedenti - una buona parte della quantità di male che esiste in questo mondo (la stessa che avanza dal limite di perfettibilità di cui sopra?) potrebbe esserci necessaria per sopravvivere, ma questo sarebbe un concetto ancora meno appropriato di quello a cui fa da corollario, presumo.

In “How To Be Good” Nick Hornby’s narrator is a woman, and I think he was successful at writing from a female perspective. However, I would not quality the novel as one of Hornby’s successes.
Early on in the text there are some acute observations about relationships and our inner thoughts and secrets that are just brilliant. Hornby is very good at articulating some of the most abstract ideas and putting them into concise and appropriate words. All of his books seem to share that quality.
The story starts quickly, and then about 50 pages in it starts to drag. As a result it was a slower read for me than most Hornby. I think this was mainly because not one of the characters is likable. Not one. Our narrator can’t get over herself, and always brings up being a doctor as proof that she is a decent person. And her spiritually converted husband is smug and more than a little stupid in his ideas after conversion. And before conversion he was also a jerk. The supporting cast is no better.
The author really takes aim in his satire of a liberal (the narrator Katie) who likes to talk the talk, but has more than few problems walking the walk. To Kate’s credit, she does seem to recognize this about herself. Unfortunately scenes of good satire are followed by ridiculous moments, one being a scene where the narrator, her husband, and her lover share a conversation in her kitchen. It is just banal, and more than a little stupid.
In short, “How To Be Good” is a dark novel. The darkest Hornby I have read. The ambiguous ending will do little to satisfy the reader as it does not lend itself to think happiness and contentment is in store for the characters, and possibly the reader for that matter. It is a bit of a downer.

This book made me sad. It was really, really depressing. In fact, so much that it actually put me in a bad mood while I was reading it.

Don't get me wrong; there were flashes of humor, clever writing, and certainly it begs a lot of introspection. But it was a real downer. None of the hope of "About a Boy", and although I haven't read "High Fidelity", I've seen that movie, and I think that had hope too.

So here's what I started writing after the first section for BBC last Saturday:

"How to be Good" isn't exactly a cheery book yet, is it, and frankly those in attendance were wondering if the notes on the cover ("Hilarious", "Such a zip to read", and "Breezily hilarious") were about this book or another. However, it also offered up quite a bit of fodder for discussion. For starters, we were very interested that it's a male author and this is from the female point of view, especially because of our knowledge of "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy". It's also interesting given the question she asks her son "do you think of me as the mummy or the daddy", and her perspective on being the primary breadwinner.

None of us got "GoodNews", or his place, nor his healing powers. We also discussed giving to charity, and her views about her position as a doctor.

I found this commentary so insightful that I was hooked from the bottom of the first page:

I can describe myself as the kind of person who doesn't forget names, for example, because I have remembered names thousands of times and forgotten them only once or twice. But for the majority of people, marriage-ending conversations happen only once, if at all. If you choose to conduct yours on a mobile phone, in a Leeds car park, then you cannot really claim that it is unrepresentative, in the same way that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't really claim that shooting presidents wasn't like him at all. Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs. (emphasis mine)

A sentence I wish I had written, and maybe one of the ones those cover blurbs was referring to, is "I can now see, for the first time, just how many worms a can holds, and why it's not a good idea to open one under any circumstances."

And then there's Katie's honesty, "My conversation with Molly has made it impossible for me not to think, even though not-thinking is currently my favorite mode of being." I totally get this -- when I'm upset, "not-thinking" is what I'd rather do any minute of the day. How is Hornby able to write a female character who thinks so similarly to the way I do?

And then there's this. Honestly? It's just one of many reasons why we didn't have kids.

And the other thing I think is that I have failed my daughter. Eight years old, and she's sad ... I didn't want that. When she was born I was certain I could prevent it, and I have been unable to, and even though I see that the task I set myself was unrealistic and unachievable, it doesn't make any difference: I have still participated in the creation of yet another confused and fearful human being.

Here's something I thought interesting, at the top of 221, when David and GoodNews are working on "reversal", and "GoodNews says excitedly, 'That's what we're doing! Building an ideal world in our own home!'

An ideal world in my own home ... I'm not yet sure why the prospect appalls me quite so much..."

I know why it bothers her so much! Because GoodNews is calling their home "ours"!

Last, I found this ... well, thought-provoking: When I look at my sins (and if I think they're sins, then they are sins), I can see the appeal of born-again Christianity. I suspect that it's not the Christianity that is so alluring; it's the rebirth. Because who wouldn't wish to start all over again?

In thinking through my final thoughts on this book, and my preference for hope in books, I would have been happy with the ending of this book if it had ended one sentence earlier. That is, I'd have removed the last sentence before publishing it.

super grim. get the girl some ssri’s and a divorce.

Really intimate first person novel about a woman whose husband suddenly stops being snarky and facetious and becomes really sincere and loving. Basically I completely sympathized with her feeling that this person, while arguably much NICER than her husband, was basically NOT her husband any more, and was also pretty annoying.

It's a great humorous approach to the same kind of material about morality that Jonathan Franzen explores in Freedom. Only, you know, funny and enjoyable rather than...Great American Novel. This is Hornby in a nutshell - he gets inside his characters heads, he creates wholly believable absurdity, and he gets under your skin while doing it.

I read this in a day. Here is how this day went: I was staying at my family's summer house with my mother and niece and nephews. I woke up late, came downstairs and made a cup of coffee. My mother had taken the whole gang to a pancake breakfast so I sat on the deck and sipped my coffee while working on a crossword puzzle. When my mother returned, she brought me pancakes and a copy of how to be good from the church bazaar. I declared that I saw no reason to leave my deck chair for the rest of the day. Eventually I did get up for the bathroom and a change of clothes (pajamas are rather hot on a summer day) but I essentially stuck to my pledge. Engaging in sloth while reading about how our human weakness makes us, well, human was a lovely way to spend a vacation day and I recommend it highly.

I suppose I could have liked this book more except I really wanted her to fall back in love with her husband and she just didn't. Things got better but...it was a little too real, I guess you could say. I can't fault the book for that, really, but I do favor an escapist book when I'm on vacation.

Ok it's called "How to be Good", so I will try to be good.

It's an interesting idea that doesn't go anywhere, and on that basis, it should have been written as a short story.

Here's why it didn't go anywhere. The characters are one dimensional, there are no backstories, nothing is done with this miraculous faith healer.

We don't get to find out why David is so broken and cynical, and we are only told in reported speech about his conversion. This is the crux of the book for fuck's sake. Someone undergoes a complete personality change, I think we need to see it.

Goodnews can perform miracles with his healing powers, so why isn't he already on the telly and in the tabloids? The premise that David and Goodness want to do good deeds would be easily covered by making Goodnews a billionaire, then they could give all that money away.

Ok, sorry, trying to be good. Hornby has tried something different and he is trying to write about a real couple having problems. So, props for that, but unfortunately, it's as boring as fuck.

Katie - the doctor / wife - is a saint to have put with David for as long as she has already, but when he starts talking bollocks and giving away the kid's computers , anyone would kick him out, but she doesn't, she tries to understand him. Oh really!

I can't be good any longer. This book is deathly dull.

I blame the author for being self-indulgent and writing it, but I also blame his editors, agent and publisher who all let this book go to print. Someone has to stand up and say, "Nick, this is really bad." But after three bestsellers, it seems no-one had the gumption to do it.

Έξυπνο,πανέξυπνο θα έλεγα,ο Χορνμπυ σε μεγάλες φόρμες.Αντρας,γυναίκα,παιδιά,σχέσεις,Λονδίνο,υπέροχο και δροσερό.

"How To Be Good" sounds like a long day at Sunday School in itchy wool pants and tight shoes. But it's far more uncomfortable than that. This latest comic novel from Nick Hornby hits the funny bone but bruises the conscience.

All fiction is implicity about morality, but with "How To Be Good," Hornby draws the curtain aside and drags our ethics onto center stage where we can watch them squirm.

His hapless heroine is Katie Carr, a hard-working doctor, a loving mother, and a loyal wife. The novel opens when she calls her husband after a one-night stand to announce that she doesn't want to be married to him anymore. Of course, that's not a good thing to do. Katie knows she shouldn't sleep with strangers or end a 24-year marriage over the phone. After all, as she reminds us with increasing anxiety, she's a good person. She helps people, for goodness sake.

But she's had it with her marriage. Her husband, David, is a bitter, acerbic partner. He writes a column called "The Angriest Man in North London." A recent installment complained about old people who travel by bus.

Once, he seemed witty and loving, but now the regrets and offenses have calcified between them, and they can't touch each other. They get along so poorly at this point that they can't even agree to separate.

This grim stalemate is finally disrupted when David visits a spiritual healer to cure his back pain. (He goes only to offend his wife's professional sensibilities.) When he returns cured, he takes their daughter, who's suffered with eczema for years. She, too, returns completely healed.

Katie snorts at this apparent success. It's an affront to her medical skill. But it's much, much more to her husband. In a wrenching character shift that makes Katie believe he must be mentally ill, David suddenly dedicates his life to being good. All the time. In every way. "Who could live with that?" the novel asks. He won't rest till he's enlisted Katie, their two children, and all their unnerved neighbors. He begins to speak with "the slow, over-confident patience of a recently created angel." At first, Katie is giddy with excitement. "Who is this man," she wonders, "who talks to his own wife in his own bed in phrases from 'Thought for the Day'? Maybe this is the most vicious and manipulative thing David has done yet."

David becomes "a sort of happy-clappy right-on Christian version of Barbie's Ken." He abandons his Angry Man column. He begins to give away their money, possessions, and food to the homeless. "This is so unlike him that it gives me the creeps," she thinks. Suddenly, "we are the ideal nuclear family. We eat together, we play improving board games instead of watching television, we smile a lot. I feel that at any moment, I may kill somebody."

Finally, David invites his young spiritual healer to live with them. His name is DJ GoodNews, and he wears turtle earings pierced through both eyebrows. Katie dislikes him immediately, but her husband throws himself into lengthy discussions about how to improve the world.

Hornby has a wonderful sense of the comic value of rage. He allows the absurdity of this plot to grow exponentially, churning up trouble for Katie and her two children along the way. Deep down, she understands her husband's lonely desire for goodness - for moral clarity in a complex world, but at the same time, she sees the lunacy and self-righteousness of his crusade.

There's something adolescent about this novel's raging debate, a reminder of that time when hypocrisy was the cardinal sin and we hadn't yet constructed the rationales that allow us to live happily amid such galling inequity. How can we go out to dinner when 20,000 children starve to death every day? Do we need a DVD player when millions don't have clean water? David won't let these questions rest, and Katie can find no arguments to use against his appeals or her own soul-ache, except the unfortunate fact that normal life as we've defined it requires ignoring most of the world's suffering while we comfort ourselves with a few self-satisfied gestures.

"Cynicism is our shared common language," she notes with a sigh, "the Esperanto that actually caught on."

Despite some great moments of brutal, over-the-top comedy, there's a tenderness that runs through this novel - an anguished concern about the calamity of moral desire in a world whose needs exceed everything we can give it.

What's most troubling, though, is the story's implication that the struggle to be always good is somehow incompatible with intelligence or even a sense of humor. The stark choice here is between ignorance of the world or tyrannical idealism. When lightning flashes over these characters, it illuminates only the harrowing darkness around them.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0705/p1...

Hornby's best novel, imo.

I bought this book maybe 6 years ago, after reading and loving High Fidelity and About a Boy. I read 100 pages or so, and put it down. A friend recently said she loved it, so I went back to give it another shot. It is, after all, about moral ambiguity and the search for a good life. That has always been one of my favorite topics. Once I got back into it, though, I remembered the things I disliked about it in the first place, namely:

1. I don't like any of the characters, major or minor, and I would not want to spend any time with any of them.

2. The major development in the story seems false and unrealistic to me.

3. The main character's search for morality is really just an attempt to look like a good person to the people around her.

There are some funny parts, but the highlight of the story for me was a cameo by a character from High Fidelity. In other words, it would have been much more enjoyable if I had simply read that again.

I've read most of Hornby's books. He's one of my favorites, and if I don't get his new one for my birthday (hint, hint), I plan to buy it and expect to enjoy it. Because I like the way he tells stories, like the way he writes, and enjoy his insights on people and relationships. So keep all that in mind when I say this one didn't really work for me.

I try to not read reviews of books I'm about to read, mostly for fear of spoilers, but also to keep from raising or lowering my expectations. That said, I did nose around enough ahead of this one to be aware it didn't seem to be Hornby's most beloved novel. And halfway through I wondered if maybe people just didn't care for reading him through a woman's point-of-view, because I was quite enjoying it. DJ GoodNews, while not someone I'd want to spend more than two minutes with, was entertaining and leading Katie Carr and her family through some downright zany life changes. Very entertaining, I thought. Why no love on Goodreads?

And then I got to the second half. And it just didn't really work. I can see Katie not wanting to tear her family apart. Divorce is so final, not to mention devastating when kids are involved. And I can appreciate she had conflicting feelings about it all. But she never really sorted anything out. She just became more miserable.

I also found the meeting with her brother at the church to be way too coincidental. She never attends, but just happens to go once and finds her clinicaly depressed brother there? Even harder to buy the wacky vicar coming into her office later for a consult. (Katie is a general practice doctor.) Even harder to buy how she badgered said vicar for an answer on whether she should leave her husband. And for all the significance of the one-time church visit, meeting her brother and finally realizing how borderline suicidal he is, she's never bothered to visit with him again?

The premise here is something that really could have worked. David (Katie's husband) turns from the Angriest Man in Holloway into a calm do-gooder whose only goal is persuading others to see the light as he has. As if their marriage wasn't already in trouble, that would be quite a shock for any couple. There are some funny scenes and characters. Some of this, especially in the first half, is vintage Hornby. But the ending felt both rushed and muddled.

If you're a Hornby fan, don't be so frightened off that you skip it. Just keep your expectations in check.

Well, this book proves that I can hate a book solely because of the protagonist. I'm disappointed because this was my first time reading a book by Nick Hornby and I wasn't impressed with the book or the writing.

The plot focuses on a woman called Katie who is unhappy with her life. Then her husband goes through a radical change and becomes " really good". Its not a bad premise for a plot but there was nothing extraordinary or original about the book's execution. Katie is absolutely unbearable. She is a horrible mother, a crappy wife and a despicable person. All she does is judge people 24/7 and she also blames all her problems on other people. The most despicable thing she did was tell her 8 year old daughter (8 YEAR OLD DAUGHTER!!!!) that they wouldn't be getting a divorce, if she was good. I hated listening to her inner monologue and the conversations she had with other people. She kept referring to herself as a "good person" but trust me, she wasn't.

The whole magical healing hands thing didn't appeal to me. I don't believe that someone can heal you with hot magical hands. David's personality change was insufferable. He went from being aggressive and annoying to preachy and annoying and I don't know which one I preferred because they were both intolerable. I disliked ALL of the characters (probably because of the way Katie described them). There was nothing good about this novel. It posed a good question: "how would you react if your husband (etc.) became 'too good'?" but I believe that Katie was the wrong type of wife to feature in this novel. The book was basically just Katie complaining and it was so depressing! The writing was meh, it didn't impress me. And I won't even get started about that horrible closing sentence!!!!!

The cover said the book was hilarious, sophisticated, compulsive, very funny, very clever, witty, brilliant and marvellous but it was none of these things. In fact, it was the opposite. I would not recommend this book to anyone and I won't be in a hurry to read another book by Nick Hornby.