How to Be Good (Nick Hornby)**

Nick Hornby is a brilliant writer. I enjoyed High Fidelity and About a Boy, and Fever Pitch is probably one of the greatest books ever written and I’m not just saying that because I support Arsenal. Supporters of other teams love it too. Even people who hate football enjoy it. And, as Fever Pitch is pretty much all about football, I think that’s a pretty strong sign that Hornby is an excellent writer.

This only made How to be Good even more disappointing. The protagonist, Katie, is a stupid bitch (yet another of these characters who are supposed to be doctors, but don’t seem to be intelligent enough to graduate from primary school), and her husband David is just annoying. Not quite annoying enough to make Katie’s nastiness reasonable, but annoying enough to make me want to stop reading about him. I didn’t stop, I stuck with this to the end, and it was a total waste of time. The only reason why Hornby merits a second star is because some of the descriptive passages are extremely well done. It’s the plot, characters and dialogue that are the problem.

The plot idea is very interesting at first glance. Katie has just started an affair because her husband is so horrible to her (not nearly as horrible as she is to him, but never mind that for the moment). Her husband is on the point of throwing her out (if I were him I’d be delighted to have such a good excuse for getting rid of her) but then he goes to see a man called GoodNews who has the gift of healing. GoodNews at first heals David’s backache, then he heals his mind. From that moment on, David is nice. He blames himself for the affair, and does all he can to make Katie happy.

Some of his attempts are amusing, it has to be said. And I suppose it is not unrealistic that Katie, after years of wishing her husband would be nice to her, discovers it’s not what she wants after all. But I do wish she’d appreciated it to begin with, and tried a bit harder to go on appreciating it. He’s trying to be nice, for God’s sake. She goes on all the time about how miserable David is, but she’s actually a lot worse.

One problem with a plot like this is you have to wonder, where’s it all going to go from here? Theoretically, there’s no reason why GoodNews can’t cure everyone in the world and make it a happier place. But once you’ve changed the whole world, how is the book going to end? ‘And they all lived happily ever after’? Fortunately, Hornby doesn’t take this route, but then he doesn’t really take any route at all. The story just meanders on and on, Katie becomes more and more annoying, until suddenly – to my great relief – the book comes to an end.

I hate the way Katie keeps saying ‘I’m a good person, I’m a doctor’. Okay, she’s not strictly a bad person. She doesn’t kill anyone. But neither she nor the new, nice David consider for a moment that some of the problems between them might have been her fault. Even if she had been a nice person, she’s unlikely to be blameless. No-one ever really seems to realise this.

Hornby is still one of my favourite writers ever though. Without him, I might not have ended up supporting Arsenal. I might have stayed supporting Millwall like my dad – who is certainly not one of those Millwall thugs you read about, but his football team seldom makes him happy. Millwall got into the play-offs last season, but he was miserable because they only finished fifth instead of third. But I can talk, the prospect of Arsenal’s qualifying for the Europa League instead of the Champions’ League fills me with dread. And probably Hornby too.