Stuff to think about in society and family dynamics.

Ok, so Hornby's a Gooner and his taste in music is not exactly mine, but he sure can write. Why do we read? To prove we are not alone? A never-ending attempt to understand the human condition? A quest for like minds? Search me. All of these and a lot more besides I would say. As with a lot of the novels I read, my wife saw this in a charity shop on a weekend away and bought it for 20p on a Saturday morning. By Sunday lunchtime I'd read it and told her she should read it too and then pass it on to our daughter, who lives on the Archway Road. My Islingtonian mate Butch would love this too, so he's also in the queue. Yes, it's a North London novel, like most of Hornby's early work, so I do feel that he's writing about my world, but it's also clever, insightful, damn funny and a very original premise for a writer. It's also very brave for a man to write as a woman in the first tense and Hornby brings it off superbly.

So why do we do what we do? Do we ever lead a truly 'good' life? How important is it to try? Who gives a toss anyway? And how do we continue to cope as we get older? This witty tome probably raises more questions than it answers, but I liked Katie Carr and sympathised with her as her self-obsessed husband sets off on his voyage of discovery and her children inevitably take sides in the mayhem that ensues. 'DJ GoodNews' is a clever device, as the character who introduces the dilemma of living the good life and the fine lines it inevitably presents between naivety, practicality and living any kind of life at all. Hornby is a wise, witty and insightful man; a wonderful writer and someone who can make you laugh and make you think, even if he is a Gooner. Not bad for 20p.

To say I didn't get this book would be a profound understatement. Near as I can tell, it's about all the terrible, mundane ways life can grind you down, how hypocracy gets all of us in the end, and the way what was once beloved can turn into what you hate in the ones you used to love.

I found this book tremendously depressing. Also, it made me never want to get married or have kids. Ever.

I was tremendously disappointed in the ending as well, at the same time as I admired Hornby's technical skill. In general, I found the writing style to be too spare for my tastes, though it did add to the sensation of walking through a barren wasteland in search of color and contrast.

"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...

I seen this book on my sister's shelf and asked her about it and her replay was:"It's horrible, characters are so annoying I wanted to torture them".

So as Calvin said, that piqued my curiosity.Can it really be that bad?Turns out that it can be as I found no redeeming part.

One of the "blurbs" on the cover of my library copy this book uses a one word review: "hilarious". This is very misleading. "How to Be Good" is an excellent read, confronts the many changes in a modern marriage where husband and wife are unsure of the ground of the marriage. There is humor. There are some very funny moments but this is not pure comedy. Not in my eyes. It's a portrait of modern ennui and angst mixed together and forming a very messy stew.

Katie, the wife, is a doctor, and one of her consistent refrains as she assesses her life and the lives of those around her is that she is a doctor and does good things for people every day. But she's struggling to believe it. Her husband, David, has been a negative, argumentative, non-working presence for several years. And there are 2 children. Can she leave? Should she leave? Can David become the loving husband she thinks she remembers?

Oh my! And this is only the very beginning. Then there are THE CHANGES!! the GOOD things that happen. Well this is where one becomes happy you aren't Katie or live in Hornby's imagination. It's funny and bleak and outrageous and true to somebody's life but thankfully not mine.

Rating a strong 4
Recommended for those who enjoy domestic drama/dramedy/?comedy.

"How To Be Good". Mixed feelings on this one. Our renown author has always had a talent for expressing emotional situations can ask relate to but can never say in words. "Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play," Doctor Katie Carr says. And this book lays it out for its readers illustrating this truth beautifully.

"How To Be Good" actually refers to a book that David Grant, the protagonist's husband, decides he wants to co-author with GoodNews, a spiritual healer who moves in with Katie Carr and their two children Molly and Tom. David used to be quite the opposite-a naysayer for a career (he writes a column in which he chooses something to have a problem with), having conversations consisting of nothing but gossiping about others. When his back goes out on him, he decides to take a chance in the dark with this man who days he can heal him. Lo and behold, he does. Thus begins David's quest for "goodness", beginning with suddenly wanting to better his marriage with Katie, acknowledging that he had not shown her love for many years now. He takes her a play, something the old David would bitch about for hours, and Katie can almost visibly see the struggle between her old and new husband as he watched. On the way back, he gives 80 quid from Katie's purse (he does not have his wallet with him, he claims) to a homeless person.

Strange, new, but overall positive, Katie thinks he is at first playing another manipulation game. Something this drastic its apparently not out of character. But then things move from strange to extreme. Like taking away the children's toys because they already have enough, to spontaneously giving away the dinner they were about to eat with Katie's parents because he simply "could not do it", and his crusade to get all his neighbors on Webster Street to take in a homeless child. (Six agree, including themselves. One robs his hosts, another forces the return of said goods by violent means. These two disappear, along with one other. The three others, all girls, are a success.)

I will say that this book will inevitably get the reader thinking. Thinking about moral issues. Thinking about the one present, the GDP. There is the apt portrayal of how David, neglecting his family to "save the world" on a more macro scale, does not necessarily make him a "better", more "good" person than Katie, who is "selfishly" not willing to take in more homeless people, nor want to give up her magazines and books and technology; her surplus, unnecessary, frivolous good that, to her, keep her sane.

A few things that I learned.

Apparently, no-fault divorce is still not possible in England. Amazing. Especially when you consider the fact that this entire story would have gone differently. By Katie's admission, the divorce would have been finalized. In fact, she finally puts aside her shame and pride to confess her adultery, but David does not seem phased. And according to https://www.gov.uk/divorce/grounds-fo..., this means nothing. Unless Katie makes David so miserable that he no longer wants to live with her and files for divorce.

Secondly, "charity" has the same root as "love", so in the King James version of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13 is written: Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

I far prefer the more common interpretation (pretty much every other version): "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

These two opposing interpretations are representative of (New) David and Katie's philosophies on this, respectively. Molly, their daughter, chooses sides with David and Tom their mother. With your new-found charity, Molly invites someone to live with their family. Understandably, her mother vetoes this. After telling their guest that he will have to go home eventually, she realizes that Molly will have a much harder time accepting her decision. "That is the thing with this brand of charity. It is all about what it does for us, not for them."

Katie's determination to remain in the marriage, despite her own happiness (and what I could easily deduce would be her children's happiness in the long term) frustrated me immensely. Despite David's open admission that their marriage was dead. It is clear that this decision is based on her need to feel like she is "good". One of the most grating things in this book was the frequent referral to how a doctor is automatically more "good". Katie even says, as fact rather than opinion, that fixtures go into it with good intentions, they must be better, etcetera. I vehmenently disagree. I know as many doctors that have told me themselves that they pursued medicine for the money and stature. And I do not believe in true altruism. Even the most altruistic feel better about themselves by being altruistic. Infuriating.

My favorite insight from the book, referring to sleeping with someone you have known for years and a lover:

"The difference between sex with David and sex with Stephen is like the difference between science and art. With Stephen it's all empathy and imagination and exploration and the shock of the new, and the outcome is... uncertain, if you know what I mean. I'm engaged by it, but not necessarily sure what its all about. David, on the other hand, presses this button, then that one, and bingo! It's like operating a lift- as romantic, but also as useful."

The first half of this book was quite amusing, and there are some interesting conversations to be had about it. Too bad that the second half was really random and that the story and ideas deteriorated...

4.5 stars

“The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”

This book is drastically different from Hornby’s other works. There is still dark humor, but family dilemma and midlife crisis hold the center of the plot. Honestly, this could be even my favorite book by Hornby because of the issues that it deals with. The author wants to tell us nothing is black and white and to be careful what we wish for, because its fulfillment won’t necessarily make us happy.

The protagonist is Katie, a 40ish medical practitioner, living with her constantly angry husband David and two kids in a London suburb. She’s unhappy with her marriage, and as a consequence is having an affair. The book starts off with her calling David to tell him she wants a divorce. He refuses to accept that, but Katie is just as confused about her own decision. The main plot deals with the question what to do when your spouse, suddenly goes from spouting poison everywhere to someone who wants to do nothing but good deeds – and irritates you even more than before because of that change. Our narrator remains on the sidelines with a lot of sarcastic comments and tries to undermine all of his good intentions.

The main characters are your normal everyday family. The book is clever and points out to all those little problems that liberals have to face. Of course, I felt provoked at times, since I am a set-in-stone liberal, but in a good way. The author asks the hard questions - what happens when you try to solve the problems in the way utopian societies do or what if you try to solve all the big problems but in a small way. Hornby, as always, has a great sense of humor and his writing seems effortless. This is perhaps he’s most realistic novel till date. While it starts out as a story about failing marriage, it becomes much deeper and personal with presenting some serious issues of family and relationships. It speaks a lot about love and how it develops (or gets smothered) by marriage and commitment. In a very humorous way, this book brings up the issue of charity and how doing good for other people can go wrong and cause tension, This is Hornby in a nutshell - he gets inside his characters’ heads, then creates a believable absurdity, and gets under your skin while doing it. I didn't like the ending though.

Katie realizes that she needs to be more careful about what she wishes for. Her lack of security with herself and confidence is the main source of her unhappiness. Throughout the book, she carries a lot of guilt and she doesn’t really look like someone who really wants to find a light at the end of the tunnel.

“I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.”

She always wants a better future, but she’s never brave enough to make crucial steps.

“It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.”

She feels trapped, not only inside her family, but also inside her own skin and has no idea how to solve her problems. While having no moral support, she has no one to turned to to talk about it and lonelines is pushing her even more into a shell. She has a lot of burden on her shoulders and fights the wish to run away, because she’s petrified of being alone.

“It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before.”

One moment, she desires the mentioned solitude, but in the next moment, she almost has a panic attack and she’d rather stay in an unhappy marriage with an unhealthy atmosphere than to make a better home for her children and herself. It’s interesting to read about her frustration because the behavior of her children is worsened by the constant conflicts between her and her husband.

Katie and David have a horrible marriage. There is no respect, no affection, communication is getting worse day after day, and they can’t even talk for two minutes without dropping venom on each other. With constant passive aggression, I don’t know how they still manage to sleep in the same bed night after night. Habit is a bitch.

“So now what? What happens when words fail us?”

Even when they try really hard to be honest with each other, it turns into a depressing moment.

“I've developed contours for his elbows and knees and bum, and nobody else quite fits into me in quite the same way.”

Here, Katie describes their sex life. It’s the only thing that genuinely works in their marriage.

This felt a bit dated, reading it in 2020, but there's still a lot of relevance here. I'm always impressed by how well Hornby can write female characters in the first person. It really is a rare skill.

This is a novel for people who like novels, a novel for people who are or want to read about middle age.

Katie Carr is a doctor married to the angriest man in Holloway. Even though she's having an affair and doesn't always care as much about her patients as she thinks she ought to, she's secure in the knowledge that she is a good person. Of course she's a good person. She's a doctor.

But when her husband David meets a spiritual healer who takes all his anger away, and David turns into the neighborhood do-gooder, Katie suddenly feels a crisis of self. Does she have to love her neighbor that much in order to be a good person? How far does one draw the line?

This is a novel about what it means to be in the middle of a marriage, when the romance is gone but you have many years ahead of you. This is also a novel about what it means to be middle class, when you're not the richest person in the world, but there are a lot of people worse off. It's about what happens when people have a crisis of faith when they're the sort of people who don't know what church they go to.

I liked that this novel was about people finding their way and trying to figure out how to be good people, yet it touched on these subjects without getting preachy or religious. I also liked that David and GoodNews were weird enough to be funny, without becoming completely absurd. Well, maybe other people will find them unbelieveable and absurd, but I've met a lot of people like that (without the supernatural powers, that is.)

The characters are solidly built. Katie is believably flawed, and even her children are real people, rather than robotic mannikins. The homeless kids that David and GoodNews try to help aren't just Dickensian paragons of pathos, but are as varied as the other characters.

Hornby can be darkly funny at moments. More than once, I laughed out loud at his sense of humor. (Like when the daughter asks her parents if they're going to get divorced, and her mom says "not if you're good.")I also liked that it was so very British. Some books set in England could be set anywhere, but for this one, I felt like I wanted to keep a running glossary of new terms (Barmy? What does that mean?).

It's an amusing novel, with a decent pace, and good characters. Except for an ending that seemed a little off (one of those deeply symbolic things that I'm sure a college literature class would love, but I didn't get it.), it's a solidly built novel.

I think the only reason why I didn't love it more is that it's kind of a novel in the middle, as well as being about the middle. I kind of prefer novels that touch a little more on highsh and lows: torrid romance rather than a begrudging desire to maybe try to make a marriage work, passionate arguments rather than weak puns, death and tragedy rather than pathetic men who don't know how to cook.

Still, it's solidly written, fairly charming, and funny. I recommend it for people who like novels about adult subjects, about people who like novels set in England, and for people who want liberal intellectuals mocked in a gentle way.

The last sentence of this book made me feel daft. I think I pretty much comprehended the majority of the book: the mild, slightly frantic despair that the main character feels over a marriage that is mutually dissatisfactory; the duplicitious and hypocritical nature of trying too hard to do good things when your own life is in shambles and you can't have fulfilling relationships with people that you actually know; the ambiguity that someone can feel when no option is without unacceptable costs.

In fact, I think the most interesting thing about the book is how Hornby illustrats the protagonist's focus on herself and her constant rationalization of her poor choices. She teeters on the edge of actually taking responsibility for her mistakes, but never quite realizes that her choices are what lead her to unhappiness. Rather, she blames her husband for her choices. Instead of making the real life changes that would come from taking responsibility and trying to fix things a bit by being less selfish, she eventually decides that finding some time for herself to read and listen to music may enable her to limp along for the next fifteen years in moderately acute displeasure and unhappiness.

I'm not saying that taking time for yourself to read and listen to music is bad. Quite the opposite. I think everyone should find things that they like to do for themselves so they can relax and rejuvinate, feel accomplished. I just don't think that doing so is a valid replacement for owning up to your mistakes properly and making the hard personality changes to start treating others better. This, the protagonist obtusely refuses to do.

Other than the last line, my issues with the book focus more on the story than the writting. Up until the complete change in personality of the husband, which is just not realistic at all, Hornby does an incredible job at describing the horror of a rotten marriage and the selfishness of someone who cannot see their contribution to the mire. Then the whole random mystic healing thing leads to the complete personality change, and suddenly the husband is not only no longer angry, but can not longer even recognize sarcasm or humor. That just wouldn't happen. It's a big pill to swallow. I suspended my disbelief to finish the story and see what Hornby has to say, but I think he could have gotten to the same place in the story without resorting to the outrageous and unbelievable. Eventually, it works itself out, but not completely. So the story is a bit tough to buy, but it can be done.

But that last line of the book is just a gargantuan puzzler. The entire book was clearly written, except the last line. Hornby suddenly, abruptly, uncharacteristically, violently jumps tracks into an affected symbolism that contrasts glaringly with the rest of the writting in the book. It's really quite ugly and ungainly. If I could only change one thing about the book, I would probably choose to change that last few words, even over the whole husband's personality change thing. I would change it to say, "...I wonder if I can keep it alive indefinitely." I figure that's what Hornby was trying to say anyway.