Nick Hornby's How to Be Good Is Disappointing in Its Familiarity

It's hard to tell if what makes Nick Hornby's new novel How to Be Good (Riverhead, 320 pages, $24) so disappointing is its familiarity or its lack of the same. In some ways, Hornby's three novels have all treated the same subjects: dissatisfaction, emotional loss and gain, eventual growth. In fact, he has subjected three different scenarios to the same treatment, which consists of the eventual conclusion that, though life isn't perfect, or even enjoyable at times, there's always a guarded optimism that sees one through. As a character in About a Boy, Hornby's second novel, says about attempting suicide, "It was always, you know, not today. Maybe tomorrow, but not today. And after a few weeks of that I knew I was never going to do it, and the reason I was never going to do it was because I didn't want to miss out? There were always one or two things that seemed unfinished."

In Hornby's first, High Fidelity, Rob, now famous from John Cusack's portrayal in the movie, is a depressed thirtysomething recently dumped by his long-term girlfriend, who has turned out to be more professionally successful than he in the years they've been together. He's a great character, because he has a certain unsmug skepticism about whether success is worth striving for, coupled with a strikingly self-aware sense that failure, which he's embracing, isn't all that much fun either.

The rubric that organizes the novel is the various attitudes of the characters toward music. It's a smart organizing device, and was even more so in the indie-obsessive mid-90s when the book was written, because it's a highly emotionally charged issue that isn't, importantly, family. About a Boy and How to Be Good unfortunately treat, respectively, attitudes toward children and family, with the same attempt to see all angles of the situation. This is unfortunate because, unlike with music, we are acutely aware in these two novels that being seriously interested in children and family will, eventually, after much hemming and hawing, turn out to be, actually, yes, a good thing. High Fidelity succeeds because it never quite makes clear whether Rob, the protagonist and narrator, is corrupted or enlightened by the thousands of hours he's spent parsing the significance of various Morrissey b-sides. And we, the readers, are undecided about the effects of music, too. For Rob and for ourselves.

This is how the second chapter of About a Boy begins: "How cool was Will Freeman? This cool: he had slept with a woman he didn't know very well in the last three months (five points). He had spent more than three hundred pounds on a jacket (five points)? He owned more than five hip-hop albums (five points). He had taken Ecstasy (five points)." It's a description of a happy protagonist that we are supposed to take at face value. But it's a straw man, and an apparent one at that. Hornby starts hammering away immediately, exposing the emptiness of his life, but for us there are no revelations. High Fidelity presents Rob's situation differently. Rob, who narrates the book, is quick to describe himself as average, aggressively average. His girlfriend has left him, and he feels like most people: sometimes good, sometimes bad. It's the bad, though, that comprises his existential state, mostly, and the book deals with his struggle to reconcile the forces in his life, love and pop music. As he says, "The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives." The novel then, comes down to Rob's negotiating whether he can dare, essentially, to renounce failure as a lifestyle. It's a comic novel with serious consequences.

When Hornby leaves ambivalence, even for a few sentences, his writing suffers. This is often the downfall of About a Boy. In one instance, Hornby contrasts Will's life with that of his more typical friend, married with kids. "Clutter! Will's friend John's house was full of it? Their place was, Will couldn't help thinking, a disgrace. Pieces of brightly coloured plastic were strewn all over the floor, videotapes were out of their cases near the TV set? How could people live like this?" This description is so obviously designed to elicit our empathy with not Will, the protagonist, but his friends. This is fine: it's good to have children, and messes, and emotional complication. I think we can all understand why this is so. But it leaves Hornby in the position of essentially writing a whole book to illustrate a point that we are ready to concede from the very first page. When we read the descriptions of Will in the first few pages?his material possessions standing in for human relationships?there is not one part of us that thinks, "Oh, well, great, he obviously has things figured out." We are on the side of complication and ambivalence from the first, so Hornby's lesson?that a complex life is the only true one?doesn't strike us as very daring. He has used the novel to attempt to take us from viewpoint A to viewpoint B, but we were already at point B when we started, and find ourselves a little disappointed that there is no C.

For all of About a Boy's weaknesses, Hornby "gets" the situation of the modern male, and it is a pleasure to read him on his favorite subject: men choosing between lifestyles. Will's attempts to sleep with single mothers by pretending that he, too, is a single parent yield some great comic scenes. And Hornby's ability to construct legitimately funny dialogue and inner monologues out of the banalities of everyday conversation is matched by few other contemporary novelists. His protagonists, in their linguistic struggles, are the inheritors of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.

How to Be Good, like Hornby's other two novels, deals with a protagonist whose life is slowly and mundanely going wrong. Unfortunately, the author introduces fantastical elements that detract from the novel's ability to speak to us. We have trouble empathizing with the character because her particular mixture of travails do not necessarily come close to us. The plot, briefly: Katie Carr, a woman whose employment as a doctor convinces her that she is a generally good woman, is about to divorce her husband, David, who's known as the "Angriest Man in Holloway," their neighborhood. Through a twist of events, a new-age shaman named, appropriately, GoodNews, comes to live with them and changes David into a do-gooder convinced he can save the world. Among the schemes he and GoodNews cook up is a plan to have everyone on their street take in a homeless kid. The pair also wants everyone to donate to charity every penny above what is absolutely needed to live. The sudden and precipitous change in David, from cynical grouch to sanctimonious saint, is necessarily jarring, and somewhat unpleasant.

The novel attempts to treat the meaning of leading a good life. Katie comes to realize that perhaps she never wanted her husband to be a "good person" on the worldly stage, but just to be nice to her and the kids. It's a valuable, if slightly recondite, concept, but Hornby's need for the character of GoodNews betrays the weakness of its execution. Katie is unable to work through these issues, as Rob worked through love and failure, without a bizarre fictionly gambit. We are little able to accompany her as she struggles, because we can't accept the presence of GoodNews. The pace of the book suffers when he is onstage, and only picks up when we are allowed to see Katie interacting with the real world, or thinking about the real subject of divorce. Her feelings about marriage are vintage Hornby: "If my thoughts about our marriage had been turned into a film, the critics would say that it was all padding, no plot, and that it could be summarized thus: two people meet, fall in love, have kids, start arguing, get fat and grumpy (him) and bored, desperate and grumpy (her), and split up. I wouldn't argue with the synopsis. We're nothing special." It's this kind of explanation that Hornby does best. He allows us to experience the major dramas of life (love, sex, loss) in the way people actually feel them: somewhat dreary, somewhat jokey, with painful rationalizations and consciously removed analogies.

It's important to note, I think, that Hornby is trying to stretch himself by narrating through a first-person female. And so many of the novel's shortcomings are more forgivable; at least he's making an effort, we say, and not falling back on reliable male narrators who age along with Hornby. But really, he carries off the female voice quite well?well enough for us not to be struck by an especially strong narratorial personality. This is damning with faint praise: what has made Hornby's previous novels strong is the strident personality that comes through from the narrator. So, while the female voice is not conspicuously off, it also doesn't make a particularly strong impression.

Like most characters in most novels, Katie blames others for her troubles, focusing on her husband. Unlike most characters, and most people, she's right. Having David as a husband and GoodNews as a permanent houseguest is, indeed, too much for anyone. It's a surprisingly clearcut situation. Unlike the protagonists of About a Boy and High Fidelity, Katie has no real need to change her attitude toward others, unless it is merely to downgrade her expectations. It makes Hornby's special territory of moral and situational ambiguity less relevant. The reader feels fairly certain of Katie's essential rightness. We can empathize with her situation, but feel convinced that some simple, straightforward steps are all that's needed to clear up her muddle. This is not a good prescription for a novel.

Hornby muddles through it, and the novel is fun and readable; I don't think the man can write a boring book. But it's not convincing.

In a major departure for him, Hornby ends this novel with some doubt as to whether life really will work out for his characters. In the two previous books, the couples are ready to soldier on, edified by their struggles. But here, it seems as though there's a good chance that Katie will end her marriage. He sets us up optimistically: Katie and David have decided to stay together, and the family is united at home in a rain storm. But there's a final note of pessimism. "My family, I think, just that. And then, I can do this. I can live this life. I can, I can. It's a spark I want to cherish, a splutter of life in the flat battery; but just at the wrong moment I catch a glimpse of the night sky behind David, and I can see that there's nothing out there at all." This, reader, is dramatic portent, and judging from Hornby's latest novel, one is tempted to reach the same conclusions.