How to be good

Thanks to Stephania for the new Nick Hornby novel How To Be Good she sent me as a Christmas present.

In this novel, Hornby confronts the Good Joe Theory. We all believe ourselves to be Good Joes, even Good Joes who occasionally do Bad Things. No one more so than his heroine Katie, who works as a doctor in North London, and is sure she is a better person than her husband David, who writes a column for a local newspaper as The Angriest Man in Holloway. David and Katie think liberal, vote New Labour and worry about Blair at dinner parties. They also do Good Things like donate to a homeless charity by standing order and this, together with her work as a doctor, suffices to assure Katie of her status as a good person.

Katie's belief in herself as a good person is confronted in the opening paragraph, as she finds herself in a carpark in Leeds, on a mobile phone to her husband, asking for a divorce. She had thought that she was not the kind of person to do that. Particularly in a car park and over a mobile phone. But apparently she is. Her belief starts seriously to come apart when David's character changes after meeting a spiritual healer. I’m a liberal’s worst nightmare, he reflects, I don’t just talk the talk, I walk it. As David starts to take immediate and personal action to look after the homeless, Katie is confronted by the discrepancy between the person she is and the person she thinks she is. Brutally funny, Hornby resists an easy resolution. A difficult story to end, and equally difficult to put down before the very last page.