Book Review: How to Be Good

How to Be Good by Nick Hornby


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the first Nick Hornby novel I've read and I've put him on a list of authors to look for in the used bookstore.

This book was swift and fun to read. I get excited whenever I see an interesting female lead in a novel, particularly one written by a man, and this story's female lead is wonderful. She's witty and clever, as well as selfish enough (in the suddenly apparently selfless world she's found herself in)to be entertaining while retaining relatability. I found her charming and layered.

All the characters in the book are surprisingly dynamic, including the two young children of the main character, Katie Carr, and her husband, David. In many reads, children have little personality and are only there for a foil to work against or tools to make drama. However these children, Tom and Molly, are funny, reactive, and well rounded. They do well in putting the adult's strange world into perspective.

There are some great observations, some great lines. I liked this one particularly:

Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already.

Nick Hornby has a straight forward writing style and spends his time on his characters rather than describing, visually, their world. It is not a prettily written book but it is still well written; the story and characters are compelling and original. I wonder if his style has anything to do with his books so often being made into feature films - his writing is pretty much just plot and dialogue, no flowery descriptions of the seasons or people's eyes.

As pretty much his only book written before 2005 not to have been made into a movie (About a Boy, High Fidelity, Fever Pitch - American and British versions) or had rights bought to be made into a movie (A Long Way Down, rights purchased by Johnny Depp), one wonders why. Perhaps I have to read his other books to more properly form an opinion, but one reason may be that it is his only novel whose main character is a female (A Long Way Down follows 4 characters, two of which are women - that is different, however, than having a single main female character). I know movie executives often shy away from films, particularly comedies, where the lead character is a woman. They could have, however, insisted Katie be turned into a man for the feature but perhaps they thought that would make the relationship between GoodNews and the spouse more suspicious.

Or maybe the story is just too absurd in comparison to his other novels. The other novels are grounded in a reality more "normal" than this.

Something interesting about his writing though. He writes similarly to my own tendencies- not very visual. At first I found this encouraging - a successful author as proof against my instructors constant insistence I be more visual in my fiction writing. Thinking about it though, I can now understand how it writing this way prevents scenes from sticking in your mind the a way a more "visual" approach would. I still prefer good plot and characters to imagery, though, and also prefer less imagery than too much.