How to Be Good by Nick Hornby

How to be Good by Nick Hornby

Katie Carr, doctor and mother of two, has been married to David for nearly two decades. David is a cynical, bitter, sarcastic man, who writes a column called The Angriest Man in Holloway– a title he does his best to live up to. Katie has recently become involved with another man, Stephan, but her affair is more a symptom than a cause of crisis in their marriage. One day, David decides to see a faith healer by the name of DJ GoodNews about his back pain, his main reason being that this will certainly annoy Katie. But after meeting him a few times, not only does his pain heal, but he becomes a new man. David becomes…good. Piously, righteously, save-the-homeless and end-world-hunger good. And Katie discovers that this new David is not necessarily easier to live with than the old one.

I was so relieved to love How to be Good. I can think of more than one person whose taste is normally similar to mine who strongly disliked it, and of quite a few who found it unmemorable at best. By now my brain crush on Nick Hornby is no secret, but I don't want you to think that this predisposed me to love this book. If anything, my expectations were higher. But to my delight, they were more than met.

This being Nick Hornby, there are several laugh out loud funny moments. But don't let that and the slightly absurd plot summary fool you: How to be Good deals with serious topics, and there are quite a few moving moments as well. The story is about relationships and anger and disappointment, about quiet everyday despair, about how people can fail to communicate, about how life can simply bring us down.

And it's also about…how we choose to live our lives, basically. I think one of the reasons why I connected with this book so strongly is because the kind of sensibility behind it is quite close to my own. Some of the questions Katie struggles with after David's transformation are questions I've asked myself. Katie has always thought of herself as a Good Person – it's one of the reasons why she became a doctor, actually – but her husband's sudden urge to convince their neighbours to adopt homeless kids forces her to confront herself: she cares about homelessness, but how far is she willing to go? How can this abstract concern be translated into everyday actions that are practical and doable, and that she can fit into her life? How willing is she to change her life for the sake of others? How guilty should she feel for the comfort she enjoys while others suffer? How much time and energy can she afford to devote to the world's problems, and how much to her own and her family's?

And then there's the ending, which was just perfect. Katie has no big epiphany – you can tell all along that this isn't that kind of book – but she does come to a realization (and this is not a spoiler, worry