Hornby’s Boboism
Nick Hornby’s leaves you…wanting more.

By Pia Nordlinger, news editor, Working Woman, and food columnist, New York Post
July 21-22, 2001

How to Be Good, by Nick Hornby (Riverhead, 320 pp., $24.95)

hanks to David Brooks, we can categorize Nick Hornby's third novel, How to be Good, with supreme accuracy: Bobo fiction.

This novel is tale of what happens when the delicate equilibrium of bourgeois-bohemian life is thrown out of whack. The story revolves around Katie and David Carr, who live with their two children in a newly chic neighborhood where the local pub has been replaced by an organic deli. Katie, the breadwinner, is a doctor, though she combines professionalism with idealism by working at a North London clinic. Her patients are sad sacks — not fellow professionals. Her stay-at-home, sarcastic husband is a crank with a column entitled "The Angriest Man in Holloway."

The couple is on the brink of divorce, but the battle lines are redrawn after David has a spiritual (definitely not a religious) conversion, at the hands of an ex-club kid, D. J. GoodNews. The conversion from cynical jerk to sensitive do-gooder leaves David wanting to live his life differently. He wants, in short, to be good.

In pursuit of that goal, the new hippy-dippy David gives one of his children's computers away to a women's shelter. He hosts a party in which he asks each of his neighbors to take in a homeless kid (of course, the Carrs take one, too). Later, he asks his children to invite over for afterschool play a classmate whom they have wronged in some way. In one of their tamer schemes, GoodNews and David decide to write a handbook: "How to be Good."

David becomes a better husband, but also an earnest hippie and a total bore. His walk on the extreme bohemian end of the spectrum leaves Katie in what might well be called Bobo limbo. She thinks of herself as a good person — a healer of the sick, after all. But she wants to leave her husband, who is now essentially too good. Does that make her bad? Should she chuck the bourgeois and join her husband on the bohemian fringe?

It doesn't give away too much to say that in the end, Boboism triumphs. The nuclear family stays together, and saving the world falls by the wayside. Conservatives may cheer to see that bleeding-heart liberals turn out to be all hat and no cattle when it comes to sacrifice. But this novel isn't so much about the hypocrisy of the Left as it is about the acceptance of regular middle-class family life.

You're not a bad person if you don't want to open your spare bedroom to a homeless person. But maybe, as you eat your free-range chicken, you should simply consider it.

For a novel of its kind — one story, no subplots, easily translatable to film — How to be Good is solid. But it does have some serious rough patches.

David's conversion is utterly unconvincing. The combination of David, who is deeply cynical, and GoodNews, who is hopelessly inarticulate, just doesn't add up to a life-changing experience. GoodNews has no philosophy aside from the belief in random acts of kindness (and that's being generous). So it comes as no surprise when David confesses to his wife that he has been — for the most part — just going along with this mad game.

But he has significantly changed his and his family's life. For what? Why? One could understand a religious conversion. GoodNews just doesn't provide enough motivation.

In addition, Hornby adds two characters — Katie's lover, Stephen, and her brother, Mark, — to reveal that the good doctor isn't as perfect as she would like the world to believe. Those characters, however, are flat, and the novel is no richer for their presence.

Overall, Hornby seems to have taken some speed off the ball. He has, in previous novels, delivered superbly wry, articulate characters who offer killer observations about life. In "How to be Good, we get this only in snippy asides, which explains why his best writing is between parentheses.

Take this passage, which has Katie and her children watching David distribute lasagna to the "winos," as Katie calls them: "(David dished it out on his own while the rest of us sat in the car. Molly wanted to go with him, but I wouldn't let her — not because she is nauseating enough at the moment as it is. I was worried that if I had to watch her feeding the poor like an eight-year-old Dickensian charity lady I would begin to hate her too much to provide proper maternal care.)"

Katie's explanation of her husband's political views is also parenthetical and priceless: "(David, incidentally, is rabidly conservative in everything but politics. There are people like that now, people who seem angry enough to call for the return of the death penalty or the repatriation of Afro-Caribbeans, but who don't because, like just about everybody else in our particular postal district, they're liberals, so their anger has to come out through different holes. You can read them in the columns and the letters pages of our liberal newspapers every day, being angry about films they don't like or comedians they don't think are funny…Sometimes I think it would be easier for David and me if he experienced a violent political conversion, and he could be angry about poofs and communists, instead of old people on buses and restaurant critics. It must be very unsatisfying to have such tiny outlets for his enormous torrent of rage.)"

Once you get over the simplistic presentation of conservatism, this is good stuff. Too bad there isn't more of it.