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Nick Hornby
I read About A Boy, High Fidelity and
Fever Pitch, and enjoyed the film version of the first
two, less so of the third. Hornby’s style of writing
and thematic interests were called the ‘male confessional’;
although I don’t see that as an accurate description
now, it did nonetheless help to define this relatively
new sub-genre, the literary New Man. Masculine but not
brutish and macho, such that it appealed to female readers
as well as male. Sensitive but not wimpy, effeminate and/or
homosexual, showing that men have feelings too. As a female
friend once said about a female writer, Hornby reveals
“trade secrets” about masculinity although
some of these, like cataloguing life in terms of football
or popular music, were already well known.
How To Be Good was notable for the female
narration written by the male writer. Critics questioned
whether or not Hornby had succeeded; the consensus seemed
to be that he had. Hornby is light reading, but not unsophisticated.
His themes are complex, funny and thoroughly contemporary,
covering some of the same ground as fellow storyteller
Tony Parsons, but with more subtlety and skill.
To begin with, I found myself disliking
Katie Carr. Husband David is clearly a difficult person
to be married to: grumpy, cynical and humourless, arguably
responsible for their marital malaise while Katie battles
with queues of intransigently sick patients. But there
are two viewpoints in every relationship and you only
see Katie’s view of David, not how he feels about
their problems, and it looks like Katie is only interested
in her perceptions. I think women tend to be more emotionally
fluent than most men, more skilled at relationships and
their psychological depths, and in that respect Katie
is an emblem for disappointed sisterhood. You align yourself
with her and feel you are meant to do so, but what about
David’s viewpoint? Irascible cynic he may be, but
how does he feel about Katie? She could probably be portrayed
as demanding, complaining, and unsupportive, but you only
ever see her in the first person looking outwards. She
has an affair, which is more usually a complaint levied
against men, when women are understandably hurt, angry
and outraged. But you see David as responsible for this,
Katie as the victim of his difficult personality.
Their marriage is not quite a role reversal
i.e. Katie going out to work while David is the house-husband,
but the way his literary/critical life is described makes
you feel he does not do ‘proper work’. This
is a typically working class attitude, like the way DH
Lawrence’s father treated the poetic and literary
son, who also painted when he was growing up. It wasn’t
man’s work, and he should have been down the mines
like his father and the rest of the male community. Hornby
presumably has some experience of this in his own working
class, Arsenal supporting background. We can thus ascribe
some of this novel to autobiographical experience. Paradoxically,
his creation of the Katie character shows a sensitive
appreciation of the female disposition while he depicts
her as the authoritative i.e. excluding voice. But within
the narrative – without reaching out to further
dimensions of authorship and Hornby himself – there
are questions to be raised regarding who we sympathise
with. It’s clear who we are supposed to align ourselves
with, but on reflection it is not straightforward. As
any Relate counsellor would tell you (presumably), relationships
are two-way and cannot be understood only from one viewpoint.
Katie’s viewpoint is thus a narrative
device, acceptable as such, making the critic’s
question ‘does Hornby do a successful woman’
central to the success of this novel. I believe he is
successful, that political or literary objections are
unfounded, and that this work raises interesting questions
on levels of narrative, authorship, and wider cultural
pattern.
However I said Hornby is ‘light’,
and he seeks to entertain rather than explore politics
or polemic. His characters are cleverly drawn, but likeable
because we recognise their foibles, frustrations and battered
aspirations, rather than their political credibility.
When David meets and then installs DJ GoodNews into their
home, we enter clearly comical terrain and have no problem
identifying with Katie’s exasperation. David’s
conversion to eco-spiritual activist is sanctimonious
and effectively the second chapter – arguably –
of his failure to understand his wife. Suddenly considerate
and understanding, his benign acceptance of her affair
may be unhelpful; you could argue that it was the equivalent
to a suicidal cry for help, a symptom of underlying problems
and an answer which she actually does not want herself.
But remember this is Hornby-land, comic and entertaining,
and we don’t take it that seriously. The meeting
between Stephen and David, with Katie as well, is one
of the comic highlights of the novel with the memorable
references to an art approach to sex and a scientific
approach, ascribed to her lover and husband respectively
(91). We might enjoy art but science is reliable, familiar,
and requires less work after a tiring day: push here,
stroke there, and the job is done. David is of course
the cuckold here, Katie feels “At this precise moment
I’m happy to be in a marriage, to be two against
one, to combine my partner against this destructive and
dangerous outsider with whom I happen to have had sex”
(90), and her husband is suddenly a clearly more attractive
prospect; it really was no more than a cry for help, and
David manages to be, in her eyes, her knight in shining
armour albeit rather unconventionally. She wants to make
him feel better, but realises that “referring to
my sexual relationship with Stephen, even given its relative
failure, is not the way to do it” (91).
How To Be Good is fundamentally a comedy
of the heart, but played out in the arena of sexual politics
and contemporary, world-weary disappointment: “We
made love that night, our first time for ages. We both
agree afterwards that it’s nice to feel some warmth,
even if that warmth is located in the genitalia rather
than the soul. But maybe something will catch” (225).
The title refers to Katie’s continuing need to feel
she is not a bad but a good person, evidenced, she feels,
in her daily NHS toils. I suspect this is itself a vaguely
female concern more than male, when women are biologically
and culturally ascribed the role of mother/caretaker.
Ironically, when David adopts the DJ GoodNews social agenda
and is arguably thoroughly good, he becomes other-worldly
and irritating. GoodNews is one of the weaker characters,
i.e. one dimensional, stereotyped and implausible, but
this is not a major literary flaw since he is peripheral
to the central concerns: first, the unhappy life of Katie
Carr, and second, what this revolves around, i.e. husband
David. GoodNews is a slapstick narrative invention, ostensibly
the admirable moral outlook to which Katie aspires, but
which in practice is absurd and ungrounded in real life
struggle.
How To Be Good is a sophisticated chuckle,
an ‘I know just how you feel’ delight, which
shows contemporary complex life in it’s multi-dimensional
reality. Along the way there are some subtle and interesting
questions to consider, in relation to the characterisation
of Katie Carr as dreamt up by Nick Hornby. My one uncertainty
is not whether Hornby is a clever and witty writer, but
whether women think this, and enjoyed this book. I do
not think that is the defining question that Hornby has
to account for, because this is a delightful novel in
a more general sense. But because of its narrative structure
and primary characterisation, it is an obvious question
to ask: Hornby, a man, has written a story about Katie,
a woman, and it is her narration that governs the story.
At the end of the novel Katie buys a
book for herself: significantly, it is about Vanessa Bell,
sister of Virginia A Room Of Your Own Woolf.
She exults in her new discovery, the imaginative pleasures
of book reading escape which most importantly is time
for her, away from all the constraints and demands
of her life. She concludes that her life and most lives
are not "rich and beautiful", and we have to
reconcile ourselves to this fact and find the small but
vital compensatory pleasures. We have to put ourselves
first at least some of the time, or we cannot function.
The final image of Hornby's work reminded me - just -
of the final image in Steinbeck's Grape of Wrath.
It's not as serious, powerful, or surprising, but it has
a similar message. Husband David vaguely risks his life
to clear a gutter in torrentially bad London weather;
Katie and her little family rally around to keep hold
of him and prevent him from falling. It is an image of
domestic vulnerability which is empowered by sticking
together against external adversity. We live life
based on small comforts rather than glamorous adventure,
finding essential time to nourish ourselves and a few
people to fill the emptiness. It's all there in How to
Be Good, but this is a lovely comic read rather than an
existential tract. And yes, as I read more I became fond
of Doctor Katie Carr.
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