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Loading... How to Be Good (2001)by Nick Hornby
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. My first Nick Hornby (how did I avoid for so long?!). Actually quite enjoyed it, although I'm sure I've come across very similar plots before (spouse starts acting different, family cant cope, lots of struggles, then everything rights itself - almost - in the end), so it's not exactly unique. My first Nick Hornby book (sad to admit, hard to believe), but I found him to be a breezy writer who could mingle humor and pathos without ever pulling you out of the story to do so. This is apparently his first book with a female protagonist, and I thought he did a great job with his newfound 'feminine' voice. Eager to read "High Fidelity" next, being a music fan and having heard so much about the book over the years. Viva! Good stuff, Nick!
Readers of ''High Fidelity'' will remember that Hornby wrapped up that sharp tale of modern love with a disingenuously bright bow of a last scene. Here, the pattern's reversed, and 305 pages of treacle (cut, it must be said, with acid humor) build to a final paragraph bearing more truth about marriage and family than all that preceded it. "How to Be Good" is partly a wry marital comedy about how a spouse's change of heart invariably destabilizes his longtime partner's own identity, but it's also a thorny parable about the dangers of complacent, conventional self-satisfaction. It's also a very funny and shrewd novel, like Hornby's others, full of acerbic observations about book-buying habits, the virtues of friends who don't really listen to what you say, the tactlessness of children, movies that all seem to "involve spacecraft or insects or noise" and the poisonous bitchiness of those dissatisfied souls who hover in the margins of the creative life. A generation ago, Western society held an informal plebiscite to decide whether the common good would be better served by sane, decent people like Katie or lollapaloozas like GoodNews. The holy fools lost, and the vote wasn't close. It's anyone's guess why Hornby felt it was time for a recount. You might say that, by the end, the questions this engaging book opens are too big for the lives it describes; but then, as Katie concludes, aren't they always? Hornby's prose is artful and effortless, his spiky wit as razored as a number-two cut. There are some delightful comic set-ups, and his dialogue sings with empathy for the discordant voices of ordinary, struggling humanity AwardsDistinctions
According to her own complex moral calculations, Katie Carr has earned her affair. She's a doctor, after all, and doctors are decent people, and on top of that, her husband David is the self-styled angriest man in Holloway. But when David suddenly becomes good Katie's sums no longer add up, and she asks herself some very hard questions. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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