How to Be Good by Nick Hornby

How to Be Good: a promising title for a contemporary novel. Unfortunately, it seems Mr Hornby has forgotten how to do what is says on the tin. Compared to "About a Boy" and High Fidelity this novel is clumsy and lethargic. I am left hoping the author is in good health, that he made it through his mid-life crisis ok. I would hate to think this was his final say on our Hornby. Hornby on Hornby worked well.

What is more likely is that Hollywood has sapped his juices, throttled his will to live, pushed him to retain his old style, but change the set of characters. "They love it, Nick," I can hear the moviemakers drawl. "Let's have more of the same, but this time with a new twist. It doesn't matter if its trash, we'll just re-write it for the movie."

The twist (more like a squirm) is that he writes from the point of view of a married woman, with a husband whose life train derails into Hippysville when their marriage reaches a crossroads. And he writes in first person present tense. Bridget Jones alarm bells were ringing in my head throughout the story, and everyone knows the best writers stick to writing about what they know best. To his credit, Hornby does appear to have a lot of insight into how women think, but no one wants to hear that from a man pretending to be a woman (cringe, cringe). Pretending to be a man may have worked for George Eliot, but she only went so far as to use a masculine pseudonym. And of course there is nothing like a bit of social repression to inspire excellence. There was no sense whatsoever of any issues that writing from a woman's point of view may have allowed, even though the main character was a doctor, a woman in a man's job. The character just behaved like a man.

Probably because of this clumsy androgyny, this book lacks the urgency of a real life struggle, and Hornby's usual excellent comedy and pathos. He actually has his characters describe things to each other, instead of them just getting on with it and acting like people. His insights into the female brain worked very well with his previous pathetic bachelor protagonists, struggling to find out what life was all about. But that insight was not enough to base an entire female character on. Any attempts to create tension here are languorous and the drawn out "humour" was irritating. I was the only one left struggling... to keep reading.

The characters live a boring, comfy bourgeois lifestyle, and even though they go through some kind of moral transformation, the characterisation remains half-hearted until the dreary eventless ending. None of the characters are likeable, and while I believe this is intentional, the style is not likeable either, and that surely cannot be intentional. He had an interesting idea to run with, but unfortunately the result is not Hornby on Hornby. It is Hornby on Prozac.

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