If one is expecting How to Be Good to offer an answer at the end of 300 pages to the question of what really happens to a marriage suffering from the neglect and battering of nearly twenty years of disinterested emotional attrition...well, it's a book about a marriage that's suffered from nearly twenty years of disinterested emotional attrition. Are we expecting a miracle resolution of some sort?

I'm not offering an excuse for How to Be Good per se, I'm just trying to set expectations. Hornby chose to write about that dirty little secret of long-term marriage in How to Be Good...those effortless million tiny steps one can emotionally take away from a partner if you're not paying attention are really the biggest threats your marriage will face. All of those little bits of attrition that can suddenly lead to calling your husband from a carpark one day and announcing that you no longer want to be married (and knowing you won't follow through) over some vague feeling. It can keep a marriage in limbo forever - or have you never wondered where those couples that seemingly hate one another but refuse to leave each other come from? This is where we find Katie Carr.

Of course, what Hornby may not have realized when he got into How to Be Good was that this was a fool's game. Those couples that have been playing this loss of love through attrition are not going to make big and sweeping changes. They are, after all, people of attrition. So when he does insert a major act of change into Katie's husband via DJ GoodNews, the big change becomes a philosophical question that plagues, divides and eventually grinds throughout the novel. When Katie's husband goes from being the Angriest Man in Holloway (so the column he writes says) to aspiring to the highest order of good, it becomes a crisis of identity for Katie.

While Hornby's discussions on the nature of goodness are interesting, it becomes a drain on the novel. After all, you have a marriage supposedly on the brink and adding this philosophical crisis seems to have started out with comic intentions but landed squarely into I thought this might be interesting for a plot that I found I wouldn't be able to mine that much humor from...and this one isn't turning out to be so funny either.

How to be Good has its moments, but it isn't one of Hornby's stronger efforts. You'll find some fun lines, but they're few and far between. ( )

This is my first Nick Hornby book, and I will be reading more of him because his writing style and innate cleverness appeal to me. I think, however, (or, rather, I hope) that I’ve started with one of his weaker books – not that How to be Good didn’t have something to impart or wasn’t worthy of my reading time, but the humour did little to hide the fact that Hornby was writing about some rather depressing and unfulfilling themes, and the narrator’s hopeless vacillation on the subject of whether it was possible to be either good or happy, never mind both, became less a biting insight into the human condition and more a source of mild irritation. Is it ironic that the only character I remotely liked was pre-lifestyle-change David who was, at least, honestly and brilliantly hateful, or was that Hornby’s point all along? Anyway, I read the entire book waiting for him to make at least a partial comeback, and the knowledge that his wife and children seemed to be doing the same thing was more than a little sad.

I can see why people read Nick Hornby. But I will be careful in future to make sure that what he’s writing about actually appeals to me, because while my time as a reader might not have been wasted, I’m pretty sure this book was wasted on me. ( )

Schriftstellerisch o.k., spannungsmäßig unterste Schublade: Die vorstehenden Bewertungskommentare greifen neben dem Buch selbst auch die inhaltliche Seite des Romans auf und ich lese zwischen der Zeilen der Bewertenden, dass das Buch nicht geeignet ist für Menschen, die sich nicht schlecht fühlen, wenn sie bedenken, dass sie das Haus voller Luxusartikel haben, während anderswo Leute erfrieren oder verhungern.
Daher erstmal vorneweg: Niemand muss sich schämen, dass er zwei PCs, zwei Autos oder drei Fernseher in seiner Familie besitzt. Und aus der Tatsache, dass ärmere Menschen auch hierzulande dies nicht ihr eigen nennen können, leitet sich für diese ärmeren Menschen noch lange kein Anspruch ab, dass eine Gleichverteilung aller Luxusgüter unternommen werden muss.
Viele Obdachlose sind nicht verantwortlich für ihre desolate Lebenssituation, aber eine Person, die sich durch jahrelanges Arbeiten und Sparen einen persönlichen Freiraum (eigene Wohnung, eigenes Haus, usw.)geschaffen hat, kann ebensowenig als Verantwortlicher dafür herangezogen werden. Und demnach weise ich es weit von mir, dass ein Einzelner einen Obdachlosen aufnehmen sollte, weil dies das Gebot der Gemeinschaft ist.
Vielmehr ist das Gebot der Gemeinschaft, dass die dafür gewählten Vertreter (Politiker) diese Missstände mit den ihnen zur Verfügung stehenden Mitteln beheben. Mathematisch logisch ist es sicherlich, wenn man sich hinstellt und behauptet, jeder können seinen Beitrag dazu leisten, aber es ist einerseits utopisch anzunehmen, dadurch ändere sich etwas Grundlegendes bei den Menschen, die aus Überzeugung gegen das System sind (und in Folge dessen u. U. obdachlos werden/sind), und andererseits kann man auch einem wohlhabenderen Bürger nicht die persönliche Freiheit einschränken, die er in seinem Heim genießt.

Nun zum Buch selbst:
Stilistisch gut wie immer, bleibt Hornby viel zu lange an den immer wieder gleichen Sachen hängen und fördert damit Langeweile. Nach vier Fünfteln des Buches gab ich auf und überflog die restlichen Seiten nur noch, um zu sehen, wie die Geschichte endet.
Ebenfalls schlecht gemacht ist die Figur "Good News". Anfangs wird er eindeutig als Wunderheiler dargestellt. Warum, so frage ich, wird diese Fähigkeit, mit der er Millionen verdienen könnte, in der Folge komplett ignoriert? Warum hat Hornby sie dann überhaupt eingeführt? Offenbar nur, um den Sinneswandel Davids vom Saulus zum Paulus zu erklären. Schwächer geht's kaum!

Die beste Stelle im ganzen Buch ist übrigens diejenige, an der der kleine Tom dem quengelnden Schulkamerad, der zu Gast in Toms Zuhause sein darf und dies dann auch noch undankbarerweise als Drecksloch bezeichnet, einen kräftigen Hieb auf die Nase gibt. Da hab ich laut gelacht!

Not his best but i finished it which means it had merits because I don't finish a book if I don't like it. ( )

This was one of those books that I catch myself coming back to and thinking about again and again in the days and weeks after closing its pages.

Katie is discontented in her marriage, and sick of her husband’s anger, and this story shows the way in which she responds when her wish is actually granted, and her husband David’s whole outlook on life changes.

David describes this change as follows:

“I’m a liberal’s worst nightmare ... I think everything you think. But I’m going to walk it like I talk it.” (p. 80)

In a way, this is a cynical indictment about the way in which our actions often fall short of our supposed ideals, about the extent to which we are content to simply mouth platitudes about the way in which we ought to think and feel and act, while behaving in the materialistic/ selfish/ comfortable way in which we always have.

And yet David's radical new views don't make Katie's life easy, and I caught myself sympathising with her on many occasions.

Ultimately, this book questioned my own assumptions about what it was to be ‘good’, and challenged me to think about whether I actually walked my own talk ... ( )