Nick Hornby: How to Be Good (German language, 2003)
German language
Published Nov. 7, 2003
How to Be Good is a 2001 novel by the English writer Nick Hornby. It centers on characters Katie Carr, a doctor, and her husband, David Grant. The story begins when David stops being "The Angriest Man In Holloway" and begins to be "good" with the help of his spiritual healer, DJ GoodNews (who also shows up briefly in Hornby's A Long Way Down). The pair go about this by nominally convincing people to give their spare bedrooms to the homeless, but as their next scheme comes around, "reversal" (being good to people one has not been good to in the past), this proves to be fruitless and thus David gives up his strivings and his plans for a book on how to be good, appropriately named "How to be Good." The protagonist, Katie, briefly encounters a minor character named Dick whose description and attitude towards music are reminiscent of …
How to Be Good is a 2001 novel by the English writer Nick Hornby. It centers on characters Katie Carr, a doctor, and her husband, David Grant. The story begins when David stops being "The Angriest Man In Holloway" and begins to be "good" with the help of his spiritual healer, DJ GoodNews (who also shows up briefly in Hornby's A Long Way Down). The pair go about this by nominally convincing people to give their spare bedrooms to the homeless, but as their next scheme comes around, "reversal" (being good to people one has not been good to in the past), this proves to be fruitless and thus David gives up his strivings and his plans for a book on how to be good, appropriately named "How to be Good." The protagonist, Katie, briefly encounters a minor character named Dick whose description and attitude towards music are reminiscent of the character of the same name from Hornby's first novel, High Fidelity.
Great book! I bought it years ago in a charity shop in Harrogate and had put it to one side because it looked heavy. I was wrong. It is was very humorous and had me laughing out loud from time to time, which is very rare for me. Not only that, but it does address serious issues in an interesting way. Definitely worthwhile.
Hornby tries something ambitious here (a novel less plot driven, more interested in the big questions of existence) and it almost works. Accept there's only the bumpiest of roads for this plot to travel on and it loses its way a bit too much. It's hard to care about big issues when they don't seem really anchored to anything, when the fiction of this work of fiction seems unfinished at the expense of what this work of fiction wants us to think about.
