's Best of 2001
In Nick Hornby's How to Be Good, Katie Carr is certainly trying to be. That's why she became a GP. That's why she cares about Third World debt and homelessness, and struggles to raise her children with a conscience. It's also why she puts up with her husband David, the self-styled Angriest Man in Holloway. But one fateful day, she finds herself in a Leeds parking lot, having just slept with another man. What Katie doesn't yet realize is that her fall from grace is just the first step on a spiritual journey more torturous than the interstate at rush hour. Because, prompted by his wife's actions, David is about to stop being angry. He's about to become good--not politically correct, organic-food-eating good, but good in the fashion of the Gospels. And that's no easier in modern-day Holloway than it was in ancient Israel.

Hornby means us to take his title literally: How can we be good, and what does that mean? However, quite apart from demanding that his readers scrub their souls with the nearest available Brillo pad, he also mesmerizes us with that cocktail of wit and compassion that has become his trademark. The result is a multifaceted jewel of a book: a hilarious romp, a painstaking dissection of middle-class mores, and a powerfully sympathetic portrait of a marriage in its death throes. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry as we watch David forcing his kids to give away their computers, drawing up schemes for the mass redistribution of wealth, and inviting his wife's most desolate patients round for a Sunday roast. But that's because How to Be Good manages to be both brutally truthful and full of hope. It won't outsell the Bible, but it's a lot funnier. --Matthew Baylis


From Publishers Weekly
"Good" characters in novels are notoriously hard to create, not because goodness is uninteresting, but because when it's uncontaminated by self-interest it isn't plausible, especially in a comedy. In Hornby's (High Fidelity; About a Boy) hilarious novel, the problem of goodness is dumped on Dr. Katie Carr. After more than 20 years of marriage and two children, Katie has had it: she's having an affair, feels intellectually dull and wishes her husband, David, would turn into a different person. Unfortunately for her, she gets her wish when David, a bitter, semi-employed intellectual who writes a column for a local newspaper subtitled "The Angriest Man in Holloway," becomes a secular saint. To spite her after an argument in which she suggests that they divorce, he goes to a dreadlocked faith-healer named DJ GoodNews. When GoodNews lays his hands on David, he suddenly becomes loving, concerned and utterly humorless. He gives money away, stops writing his column, organizes housing for the homeless (inconveniently enough, with neighbors whose houses have empty rooms) and invites GoodNews to move in. David donates the children's surplus toys to charity and asks them to adopt the uncool kids at school as their friends; their son, Tom, hates this, but his sister, Molly, develops an alarmingly patronizing friendship with a smelly little girl named Hope. Just how will Katie handle being surrounded by all of this horrible goodness? Hornby relies less than usual upon pop references which would be inappropriate for Katie's character anyway, although Homer Simpson is invoked a few times but he has created, without them, a very funny agon of liberalism. (July 9)Forecast: Despite, or perhaps because of, the declining popularity of the self-conscious hipness that made High Fidelity such a hit, Hornby's latest should enjoy even wider U.S. sales, bolstered by a national print ad campaign and author tour.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
"I'm not a bad person. I'm a doctor," says Katie Carr, liberal 1990s North London mother of two. This is her hollow mantra, the only comfort that she can feign while her 20-year marriage to surly David falls to pieces. Just when she is about to be kicked out of the house after confessing to an affair, David returns from a visit with an ecstasy-dropping club kid-turned-faith healer named DJ GoodNews a changed a good man. For his third novel after the male-sympathetic High Fidelity and About a Boy, Hornby hasn't merely gotten in touch with his feminine side (though Katie's violent emotionalism, surgical introspection, and perverse romanticism are all on the mark); more importantly, via Katie he harrowingly portrays how ambivalence attacks the heart like a virus at mid-life. Nothing, not even her children, it seems, is completely deserving of Katie's love or her disgust. Readers will see themselves in all of Katie's flaws especially her selfishness. But fear not, old-school Hornby fans, for this departure is expertly tempered with flecks of humor and pop culture references. Essential for all contemporary fiction collections. Heather McCormack, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* In a departure from Hornby's trio of recent best-sellers, which positioned him as a wise and funny spokesperson for the Modern Male, this new novel features a woman protagonist, and it is every bit as charming and effective. Katie Carr, mother of two, is a doctor in a small London practice; she thinks of herself as a good person--good, despite the affair she's been having, which is justified because her husband, David, is such a sourpuss. David is, in fact, professionally cynical. He writes a newspaper column called "The Angriest Man in Holloway," in which he shoots arrows at any popular subject he can think of. Into their fractured family comes GoodNews, a charismatic, multipierced Generation X-er who displays miraculous healing powers. Under GoodNews' tutelage, David reforms his ways to the extreme; he starts giving away material possessions, attempts to make reparations for decades-old wrongs, invites a homeless teenager to live in the spare bedroom--all to Katie's increasing alarm. What does it mean to be truly good, anyway? Breezy without being shallow, truth seeking (and, egad, spiritual) without being sentimental, Hornby's novel explores the theme of goodness with tremendous fun. The novel's final message seems to be the potentially deadly "There's no place like home," but Hornby succeeds, in large part because he's got the heart, the brain, and the courage to prove it quite convincingly. James Klise
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


The Spectator
Hornby is a very funny and very clever writer, and How to be Good is packed with wit and brilliance.


Book Description
"Hornby is a writer who dares to be witty, intelligent, and emotionally generous all at once." (The New York Times Book Review)

How to Be Good is a story for our times-a humorous but uncompromising look at what it takes, in this day and age, to have the courage of our convictions. In his third novel, Nick Hornby, whom The New Yorker named "the maestro of the male confessional," has reinvented himself as Katie-the consummate liberal, urban mom-a doctor from North London whose world is being turned on its ear by the outrageous spiritual transformation of her husband, David. How to Be Good has the ironic, funny, startlingly accurate take on our modern selves and our modern world that has become Hornby's turf as a chronicler of our popular culture-but this time he tackles it all with more richness and depth, and carries his readers beyond the comic confines of the novel to a bigger truth about themselves. It's a story about how to wreck your marriage, how to help the homeless, how not to raise your kids, how to find religion . . . and how to be good.


Download Description
"Katie Carr is a good person. She recycles. She's against racism. She's a good doctor, a good mom, a good wife....well, maybe not that last one, considering she's having an affair and has just requested a divorce via cell phone. But who could blame her? For years her husband's been selfish, sarcastic, and underemployed, writing the ""Angriest Man in Holloway"" column for their local paper. But now David's changed. He's become a good person, too-really good. He's found a spiritual leader. He has become kind, soft-spoken, and earnest. He's even got a homeless kid set up in the spare room. Katie isn't sure if this is a deeply-felt conversion, a brain tumor-or David's most brilliantly vicious manipulation yet. Because she's finding it more and more difficult to live with David-and with herself."


About the Author
Nick Hornby is the author of the bestselling novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, as well as the memoir Fever Pitch. He is also the editor of the short-story collection Speaking with the Angel. In 1999 he was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award.

FROM OUR EDITORS

New Age guru GoodNews arrives just in time to teach crabby middle-aged columnist David how to be a Good person in this piercingly funny novel. But disenchanted wife Katie -- who's been aching for a happier husband (or a divorce) -- is bewildered by David's transformation. How to Be Good is a witty, insightful, and ultimately powerful look at modern values.

ANNOTATION

It':s a story about how to wreck your marriage, how to help the homeless, how not to raise your kids, how to find religion ... and how to be good.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

How to Be Good is a story for our times￯﾿ﾽa humorous but uncompromising look at what it takes, in this day and age, to have the courage of our convictions. In his third novel, Nick Hornby, whom The New Yorker named "the maestro of the male confessional," has reinvented himself as Katie￯﾿ﾽthe consummate liberal, urban mom￯﾿ﾽa doctor from North London whose world is being turned on its ear by the outrageous spiritual transformation of her husband, David.

How to Be Good has the ironic, funny, startlingly accurate take on our modern selves and our modern world that has become Hornby's turf as a chronicler of our popular culture￯﾿ﾽbut this time he tackles it all with more richness and depth, and carries his readers beyond the comic confines of the novel to a bigger truth about themselves. It's a story about how to wreck your marriage, how to help the homeless, how not to raise your kids, how to find religion . . . and how to be good.

SYNOPSIS

"Hornby is a writer who dares to be witty, intelligent, and emotionally generous all at once." (The New York Times Book Review)

How to Be Good is a story for our times-a humorous but uncompromising look at what it takes, in this day and age, to have the courage of our convictions. In his third novel, Nick Hornby, whom The New Yorker named "the maestro of the male confessional," has reinvented himself as Katie-the consummate liberal, urban mom-a doctor from North London whose world is being turned on its ear by the outrageous spiritual transformation of her husband, David. How to Be Good has the ironic, funny, startlingly accurate take on our modern selves and our modern world that has become Hornby':s turf as a chronicler of our popular culture-but this time he tackles it all with more richness and depth, and carries his readers beyond the comic confines of the novel to a bigger truth about themselves. It':s a story about how to wreck your marriage, how to help the homeless, how not to raise your kids, how to find religion ... and how to be good.

FROM THE CRITICS

Punch

An excellent example of Nick Hornby at his best. Witty and comic, Hornby also manages to be moving and moral.

Guardian

Enormously readable and ultimately powerful.

New Statesman

This novel is a good, dark, espresso-strength comedy tha nobody else could have written.

Observer

You can't help but get along with Nick Hornby's books.

Spectator