In the first installment of this series on great novels about marriage we looked at a thousand-plus-page epic novel about life and death in medieval Norway: early death, mutilation, miserable weddings, war, prowling wolves, even the Black Plague itself. So you might be relieved by the book I’ve chosen this time. Nick Hornby’s 2001 How to Be Good has a bright yellow cover, a modern British setting, and a manageable three-hundred pages. This first impression is misleading. How to Be Good is a brutal portrait of marriage—and an attack on virtue itself.
It’s often painfully funny. The narrator, Dr. Katie Carr, is something out of Absolutely Fabulous. Or maybe she’s the tamped-down British feminine version of a Philip Roth hero, all howling thwarted rage. She has built her entire life on the shaky foundation of her profession. She’s a doctor: She’s a good person, in other words. She deserves better. If you don’t recognize at least some of yourself in Katie–in her entitlement, her self-defeating miserable anger, her anguished cry, “I WANT MY ROAST LUNCH”–then I worry that you may be a saint, and a dead one at that.
Katie’s marriage is pretty awful when the novel opens. She’s married to David, “The Angriest Man in Holloway”–no, that’s really his job title, the pseudonym under which he writes a column for the local paper. When she tries to get her husband to have a serious talk about the problems in her marriage, his only reply is a resigned, cavalier, “Too late now.” She sinks into a tacky, unsatisfying affair because it represents “the only sense of a future I have”; it symbolizes the hope of “a better, blanker life than this one.”
And then her husband meets a guru. A hippie epigone named GoodNews heals his chronic back pain—and his chronic anger and contempt. Before she knows what’s hit her he’s apologizing, attempting sincere conversation about her needs, pressuring the kids to give their toys to the needy, inviting GoodNews and then local homeless youths into their house. Being a good person was her thing! Why is the Angriest Man in Holloway trying to horn in on her thing?
One of the painfully familiar aspects of this novel is the way Katie’s horrible behavior stems from and feeds her sense that she’s deprived, unloved, and unlovable. She’s overfed and starving. She feels so shockingly alone when she’s surrounded by her family.
In fact all of the characters are relentlessly alone, which is part of the reason for their failures. Even GoodNews and David don’t try to learn from other people who are helping those in need or making amends; they reinvent the wheel, and specifically they reinvent AA’s eighth and ninth steps, and they don’t seem to realize that other people may have tried these things before. This approach fits with the novel’s themes of isolation and of charity as maintenance of self-image, but I suspect it blunts the satire—I’d love to read a take on actual works of mercy as ferocious as Hornby’s riff on the depleted spiritual reservoirs of the Church of England.
Katie has ethics without mercy; the point of being good, for her, is that it lets you be a good person, one of the good ones, better than others. She has nowhere to receive inexhaustible love and kindness for herself, and so she’s too exhausted to extend mercy to anybody else. Years fighting a marriage of attrition have left her unable to trust, so every conversation with her husband becomes a Bugs-and-Daffy exchange of sadism: “I say it’s duck season and I say fire!”
Still, maybe part of the point of the book is that “better than where we started” is a lot more than many people ever get.If I have one complaint about this book—and I do want you to read it—it’s that the characters lack imagination. They don’t go far enough. The book is content to wallow in its sullen poignance, the failure of its heroes’ grand ethical ambitions. They achieve a slight new, chastened resignation, but they find nothing greater than unhappy overprivileged suburbia. Still, maybe part of the point of the book is that “better than where we started” is a lot more than many people ever get.
The marriage in this book is pretty painful. At one of its high points David compares it to a scabbed-up shelter dog. But there are times when we need our own clutching neediness and resentment exposed. How to Be Good gave me some huge shocked bursts of laughter even as I winced in recognition.
Editor’s note: This post is the second in a series on five great novels about marriage.
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