By Nick Hornby
Riverhead Books,
305 pages
The funny thing about Nick Hornby books is that they end up being better movies than novels. The British author of High Fidelity and About A Boy must have some pretty good connections, because Stephen Frears’ version of his novel about a record collector’s romantic mishaps actually improved on the book’s comic timing; and Hugh Grant pulled one of his best roles out of a lumpy, wobbly book about an aging hipster who befriends a young lad.
Now there’s How To Be Good, more ambitious than Hornby’s earlier work, yet at the same time more tedious and preposterous. And you can bet – bet just about anything – that there will be a movie version, starring, oh, let’s say Colin Firth as the cynical columnist who has a spiritual conversion. And Kristin Scott-Thomas, surely, will play the long-suffering wife who stands by him.
Just to prepare you for this cinematic eventuality, Hornby repeatedly has his female protagonist Katie Carr, G.P., say things like "If this were a movie," and "in the movie version of this moment…" It’s a self-conscious gesture that makes you realize how eminently filmable Hornby’s output has been so far. He seems to think in movie dialogue, dovetailed scenes and comic bits that somehow miss being great by the end. (Witness About A Boy, the ending of which was rewritten for the movie version.) There’s a certain lightness, a TV-ness to his books, I think.
Yet Hornby has clear strengths – a sharp comic voice chief among them – that salvage How To Be Good from being Just Mediocre. And in his latest book he continues to raise the stakes, moving from self-relationship in High Fidelity to interpersonal relationships in About A Boy, finally progressing to one’s relationship with the world. How To Be Good is a novel about ideas, finally, and maybe he accomplishes all he can in 300 swift, breezy pages.
At the opening, Katie is trying to tell her husband, David, that she wants a divorce – over a cell phone. It’s symbolic of how removed and distanced their communication has become. When she admits she’s having an affair, David is at first stoic about the news. Katie soon learns he’s been seeing a spiritual healer named DJ GoodNews who has made his back pain, along with his immense burden at being "The Angriest Man in Holloway" (the name of his newspaper column), disappear overnight. Suddenly he’s giving money away to the homeless, sending his kids’ extra computer and toys off to orphan centers, and acting like the Second Coming.
The book focuses on Katie’s battle to retain her sense of "goodness" – she’s a doctor in a free clinic – against David’s self-righteous conversion. In this, Hornby has a good time with Katie’s exasperation: David was a man who hated theater, movies, celebrities and just about anything associated with joy or fun. Now he’s acting like a Pilgrim.
We walk out into the cold as if we were simply another pair of contented theatergoers. I can’t resist asking.
"Did you enjoy that?"
"I did. Very much."
"Really? Very much?"
"Yes."
"But you hate the theater."
"I think… I think I thought I hated the theater. It was… it was a prejudice I hadn’t examined properly."
"You want to be careful."
"Why?"
"If you start examining your prejudices carefully, there’ll soon be nothing left of you."
Teaming up with GoodNews – a character who resembles a cockney, down-and-out version of Jesus Christ – David decides to change his family’s entire moral direction. He holds a neighborhood party and convinces half a dozen people to take homeless youths into their spare bedrooms. He forces his kids to go through Guilt Therapy, having them bring home and befriend somebody at school whom they’ve mistreated. A lot of it backfires, but some of it, to Katie’s consternation, makes sense and begins to eat away at her own sense of self-worth.
To be honest, there are plausibility gaps in How To Be Good. Like, it’s hard to believe Katie would put up with so much pious bullshit from David for so long without hitting him over the head with a skillet. And it’s hard to believe that David would put GoodNews before his own wife’s needs. You are led to believe that David has converted so radically that he’s beyond conventional human relationships, and this doesn’t quite convince. (Indeed, Katie does move out temporarily, just to retain a sense of her own being.) And each Nick Hornby book has to have at least one obligatory cornball scene; in How To Be Good, it takes place as Katie discovers her hubby has kept a secret wedding album stashed away under his bed, meaning he’s really loved her all along.
Meanwhile, something has to be said about Hornby’s dithering, self-debating style, which must make his books easy to read (and presumably easier to write). Katie’s first-person narrative allows Hornby to work in every little gag, witticism and train of thought he wants to pursue. But at times it feels like moth wings fluttering: there’s very little direct impact on the reader; it all just kind of breezes by. Too much telling, not enough doing.
Of course, these are the kind of toss-off lines that will be resurrected and polished off for maximum comic impact in the movie screenplay. Because, let’s face it, there will be a movie. Just you wait. They will probably have to rewrite the ambiguous non-ending of How To Be Good for Hollywood, but one thing is clear about Nick Hornby books: they are practically gagging to be made into movies.