Here is another terrific Hornby novel, but from earlier in his career somewhere after High Fidelity and before Juliet Naked. It is about Katie and David Carr, a married couple in Holloway, England with two fairly demanding kids, Tom and Molly. Katie is a general practitioner and a little smug about her profession. David is "The Angriest Man in Holloway," an acerbic columnist for the local paper. His naked hatred of everything has worn Katie down and at the onset of the novel she is seeking solace with Stephen and feeling quite guilty about it.
David also suffers from a bad back for which his physician wife can do nothing. It seems that Katie has quite a few patients for whom she can do nothing and this performance deficit is another thing driving Katie to have an affair. But David ends up going to a grungy street healer type named D. J. Good News who only has to touch David's back to make it all better. And just for good measure, he cures Molly's eczema, another condition for which Katie could do nothing.
It seems that Good News has not only cured David's back, but has also cured him of his rotten disposition. He is no longer "The Angriest Man in Holloway;" instead, he has become a cross between a Fuller Brush salesman and a Hare Krishna. His transformation is more than Katie bargained for, especially since Good News has moved in with the family and she is slowly going crazy and suppressing an urge to murder someone, anyone.
If you have been clever enough to have read other works by Hornby, you will recognize the trope on display in its formative stages here. A central character has to navigate the shoals of all these relationships while trying to find meaning in a life filled with lots of hot air and precious little substance. The characters coalesce around some focal point, D. J. Good News in this instance, and they manage to help one another out of their malaise by discovering some underlying truth. Then they all wander off to their respective worlds until the next existential crisis forces their hands.
Sounds dreary, but under the influence of Hornby's prose it is a hilarious trip. It also provides a few profundities along the way for those of us who need more than simple hilarity.
The title of the novel supplies the theme. How is it possible to do good without simultaneously being a "do-gooder?" Until she met D. J. Good News, Katie never thought about this question. She was, after all, a doctor. Of course she did good, notwithstanding her numerous failures with her patients and her deplorable habit of assigning cruel nicknames to some of her more notable cases.
But Good News and the transformation of her husband give her pause. Katie doesn't want to give away half of the children's toys to those less fortunate. She doesn't want a homeless boy moving in with them. She doesn't want to go door to door proselytizing and alienating her neighbors. She doesn't want to bring home any of her weirder patients for a chicken dinner. But she doesn't have good arguments for her position. In her gut she feels selfish; however, her mind tells her it is Good News and David who are being selfish. How to do good in this situation?
More to the point, what is fair and what isn't What is our obligation to others? What is our obligation to ourselves? Our families? I have four televisions. There are only two of us in the house. We spend a lot of money at expensive restaurants and we travel quite a bit. I drive an Infiniti. Do I need to start throwing things overboard so I can fit through the eye of a needle?
How to be good?
There is a nice, albeit overly didactic, metaphor at the end of the novel that states all this in a nutshell.
For the last three days, it has been raining, and raining, and raining. . . . The last time it rained like this was in 1947, according to the news, but back then it was just a fluke, a freak of nature; this time around, they say, we are drowning because we have abused our planet, kicked and starved it until it has changed its nature and turned nasty. It feels like the end of the world. And our homes, homes which cost some of us a quarter of a million pounds or more, do not offer the kind of sanctuary that enables us to ignore what is going on out there; they are all too old, and at night the lights flicker and the windows rattle. I'm sure that I am not the only one in this house who wonders where Monkey and his friends are tonight.
Nick Hornby! Sometimes he makes you put both hands on top of your head to keep from floating away.
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