Nick Hornby is known for his testosterone dominated (in a tasteful way, for the most part) novels such as High Fidelity and About a Boy, both of which were turned into films (and this writer shamelessly loves both versions). These novels usually detail a male character lost in his ways looking for an answer.
In 2003’s How To Be Good, Hornby has a character like that, named David, but it is his wife Katie that the novel focuses in on. Katie has found herself in this marriage unhappy, restless and destructive; from the beginning of the novel she attempts to execute the idea of divorce, reflecting on how she’s been waiting for this moment since she began daydreaming about marriage. Then she has an affair. David, a grumpy newspaper columnist who has let himself go doesn’t let her carry out the divorce. Their children, Tom and Molly, are caught in a parental match and they take sides in the slightest of Freud’s theory.
And then something happens, something unexpected. David meets a man named GoodNews, a self-started healer with hot hands. David and GoodNews strike up an interesting platonic relationship, resulting in GoodNews moving into the family home after healing David, turning him to spirituality to try and save his marriage.
So as you might predict, chaos ensues. Katie pummels into even more confusion than she thought she could deal with and the two are put at odds in order to fix the complication they created. Along the way they must deal with many homeless people that GoodNews and David vow to help, problems their children develop, family members, patients from Katie’s practice and more.
Katie’s realizations often come quick, first as a pun and then as a gut feeling. After her children tried to do their part by eliminating regret, it ultimately fails, but in a good way. “An ideal world in my own home … I’m not yet sure why the prospect appalls me quite so much,” she reflects. “…but I do know somewhere in me that GoodNews is wrong, that a life without hatred is no life at all, that my children should be allowed to despise whom they like. Now, there’s a right worth fighting for.”
The result is occasionally humorous but overall it’s mainly interesting to see into the crevices of such a self-tortured marriage, spending the time hoping Katie and David can work it out. Read the novel to observe this couple’s quest on how to be good in their own ways by realizing they’ve been bad.
How To Be Good gets to the heart of what happens in a marriage many chick flick books don’t tell us. Hornby introduces Katie as a woman who is powerful sexually, but in time you see she is just crying out to be heard and loved by her husband in all the wrong ways. It’s interesting to watch Katie’s transformation that she doesn’t even realize she goes through until the end. While she finds herself thinking rude thoughts about people she knows, with the new presence of her husband she learns to find a compromise.
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