Self-Helpless
Nick Hornby's How to be Good
Richard Lew
October 1, 2001
How to Be Good, by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books, 2001), 305 pp.
For a novelist best known for his candid and deeply funny portraits of male immaturity, Nick Hornby's latest offering seems a bit improbable. Hornby made his name with his memoir Fever Pitch and his novel High Fidelity, both of which gave voice to masculine emotional meanderings by intertwining obsessions with sports and pop music with the romantic confusion of single males. His second novel, About a Boy, broke out of the "lad novel" genre-but only slightly-by pairing an emotionally stunted 36-year-old with a 12-year-old boy growing up too fast. How to Be Good, though, pushes the British novelist's neatly choppy prose into murkier waters. As many reviewers have been quick to point out, the latest novel is told from the viewpoint of (gasp!) a woman. But more astonishing than the obvious shift from explaining the lives of single males to describing married couples on the verge of divorce is Hornby's attempt to seriously reckon with questions of virtue. Couched in the confusion and instability of a troubled relationship, Hornby gives sensitive voice to (if not answers for) the deep questions of self, goodness, and love in a world that has lost all certainty.
From the onset, How to Be Good presents us with a rapidly destabilizing moral universe, as Katie Carr, general practitioner, wife, and mother of two, telephones her north London home to check up on the kids and then lets it slip that she wants a divorce. Marriage to her husband David, the self-professed "Angriest Man in Holloway" is certainly not an easy thing, and Katie's 20 years of devotion to job and family have earned her the role of the moral conscience in the marriage (and the right, she feels, to have ...
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