How to Be Good (audio book)

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. When David suddenly becomes good, however - properly, maddeningly, give-away-all-his-money good - Katie's sums no longer add up and she is forced to ask herself some very hard questions... Nick Hornby's brilliant new novel offers a painfully funny account of modern marriage and parenthood and asks that most difficult of questions: what does it mean to be good? [Hornby] writes with a funny, fresh voice which skewers male and female foibles with hilarious accuracy' Guardian 'He should write for England' Observer 'Hornby's aim is true....like all good comic writers, Hornby uses joke to confront more deeply, not side-step' Daily Telegraph 'Hornby is a writer who dares to be witty, intelligent and emotionally generous all at once' The New York Times I come home from work and David almost skips out of his office to greet me. < br>I come home from work and David almost skips out of his office to greet me. 'Look,' he says, and then proceeds to bow at me vigorously, as if I were the Queen and he were some kind of lunatic royalist. 'What?' 'My back. I don't feel anything. Not a twinge.' 'Did you go to see Dan Silverman?' Dan Silverman is an osteopath that we recommend at the surgery, and I've been telling David to see him for months. Years, probably. 'No.' 'So what happened?' 'I saw someone else.' 'Who?' 'This guy.' 'Which guy?' 'This guy in Finsbury Park.' 'In Finsbury Park?' Dan Silverman has a practice in Harley Street: There is no Harley Street equivalent in Finsbury Park, as far as I know. 'How did you find him?' 'Newsagent's window.' 'A newsagent's window? What qualifications has he got?' 'None whatsoever.' Information delivered with a great deal of pride and aggression, inevitably. Medical qualifications belong on my side of the great marital divide, and are therefore to be despised. 'So you let someone completely unqualified mess around with your back. Smart decision, David. He's probably crippled you for 1ife.' David starts to bow again. 'Do I look like someone who's been crippled?' 'Not today, no. But nobody can cure a bad back in one session.' 'Yeah, well. GoodNews has.' 'What good news?' 'That's his name. GoodNews. Capital G, capital N, all one word. DJ GoodNews, actually. To give him his full title.' 'DJ Not Dr.' 'It's, you know, a clubby thing. I think he used to work in a disco or something.' 'Always useful when you're treating back complaints. Anyway. You went to see someone called GoodNews.' 'I didn't know he was called GoodNews when I went to see him.' 'Out of interest, what did his advert say?' 'Something like, I don't know. "Bad Back? I can cure you in one session." And then his telephone number.' 'And that impressed you?' 'Yeah. Of course. Why mess around?' I'm presuming this GoodNews person isn't some sort of alternative therapist.' It may not surprise you to learn that David has not, up until this point, been a big fan of alternative medicine of any kind; he has argued forcefully, both to me and to the readers of his newspaper column, that he's not interested in any kind of cure that isn't harmful to small children and pregnant women, and that anyone who suggests anything different is a moron. (David, incidentally, is rabidly conservative in everything but politics. There are people like that now, I've noticed, people who seem angry enough to call for the return of the death penalty or the repatriation of Afro-Caribbeans, but who won't, because, like just about everybody else in our particular postal district, they're liberals, so their anger has to come out through different holes. You can read them in the columns and the letters pages of our liberal newspapers every day, being angry about films they don't like or comedians they don't think are funny or women who wear headscarves. Sometimes I think life would be easier for David and me if he experienced a violent political conversion, and he could be angry about poofs and communists, instead of homeopaths and old people on buses and restaurant critics. It must be very unsatisfying to have such tiny outlets for his enormous torrent of rage.) 'I dunno what you'd call him.' 'Did he give you drugs?' 'Nope.' 'I thought that was your definition of alternative. Someone who doesn't give you drugs.' 'The point is, he's fixed me. Unlike the useless NHS.' ' And how many times did you try the useless NHS?' 'No point. They're useless.' 'So what did this guy do?' 'Just rubbed my back a bit with some Deep Heat and sent me on my way. Ten minutes.' 'How much?' 'Two hundred quid.' I look at him. 'You're kidding.' Nick Hornby talks exclusively to penguin.co.uk about mystics, marriage and modern parenthood in his brilliant new novel, How to be Good. Penguin.co.uk: You have a female narrator in How to be Good. Did you ever see that as a struggle, or did you always conceive of it as being narrated by a woman? Nick Hornby: The reason I chose a female narrator is because of the way the book is structured. I wanted to write about a marriage, about how some kind of spiritual conversion affects one of the partners in the marriage, and I wanted the other partner to comment on it. I have to say it seemed much more dramatic that the male was converted, somebody who was grumpy, cynical and bitter. This sounded much more to me like a man than a woman. So that left me with the woman narrator. I didn't really worry about it as I really don't think we're so different anymore. I think that fifty years ago it would have been hard for any of us to write in a different gender, but we live very similar lives now. I don't think men and women are as different as the glossy magazines would have us believe. Men spend much more of their time talking to women in the workplace, and the nature of relationships, of marriages and of friendships are very different. So I didn't really feel I was writing from the point of view of an alien species. P: What has been the reaction of female readers? NH: The female narrator hasn't been an issue so far, although you can tell from the almost all-female list in the acknowledgements that I actively sought female opinion! P: As a reader I found myself asking the questions that the narrator was asking herself. Were these the questions that were unsettling you too? NH: There's a line that David, the husband, has at the beginning of the book, where he says "I'm a liberal's worst nightmare, I'm going to walk it like I talk it". Basically all the idle thoughts we've ever had about trying to be nicer and more charitable, David puts into physical action and he won't be deterred from that course. P: You've chosen to continue living in Highbury in north London. Do you feel you could of insulated yourself from these kind of questions? NH: I think that my son Danny, who is autistic, has had a great influence on the book because I have been more involved and asked to do things that I wouldn't otherwise have been asked to do if Danny hadn't been autistic. I think you're bound to think about these things if you are exposed in that way, it wouldn't be very easy to say "No, I'm not going to get more involved with autism, I'm not going to try and raise money for the school, I'm not going to help out any other parents". You're exposed to a kind of need and concern in a way that I think a lot of other parents aren't. Well, certainly not in such a dramatic way. P: Would it be fair to say that the book juxtaposes two kinds of ways of dealing with how to be good? NH: I think what I wanted to write about was how the wife had always previously been the moral conscience in the relationship. Katie is a good person in the way that most of us are, or have the potential to be. She does something socially useful, she worries about things in a way that we all do. But David takes things up to a whole new level that might actually accomplish something. I didn't ever want to rubbish him or his Guru side-kick, DJ GoodNews. I wanted them to ask proper questions that have no answers and for her to be put on the back foot morally. So Katie goes from having been the moral conscience, to somebody who is struggling to answer questions all the way through. I think that's the bargain we all seem to have made. We have a moral duty to our nearest and dearest and if there's anything left over we'll put a few bob in a tin somewhere. I read somewhere that there had been a lot of research done, on 'activists' and good people, with a capital G, capital P, and they always found the same thing. The immediate family was in complete chaos; I mean what must it have been like to have been a child of Ghandi's? P: The portrait of David when he's grumpy is some of the funniest stuff in the book. NH: David has a sort of job writing a newspaper column for a local paper, called 'The Angriest Man in Holloway'. He is an exaggerated truth of an awful lot of people I know, and particularly men. There's a scene in the book where David goes to this dinner party and I had been thinking about what it would be like if one took cynicism and extracted it almost surgically from conversation, so you weren't allowed to say anything bad about anyone. I think ordinary social discourse in Britain would completely grind to a halt. You know, you're not even allowed to say anything bad about Jeffrey Archer, who is an accepted whipping boy; David doesn't even like judgement of somebody like that. I just thought it was a quite a funny idea, if we weren't allowed to bad mouth people we wouldn't know what to say. P: The book doesn't come to any resolutions, because I suppose these things are not resolved in anybody's life and it is after all a novel. It is quite an ambiguous ending. NH: Somebody interviewed me in Germany a couple of weeks ago about the book and she said, "It reads like an advert for the nuclear family". I thought blimey, if an advertising agency had made that I'm not sure I'd pay them at the end of it, if that's what I had wanted them to do. I suppose the most important question for Katie is "can you be a good person and get divorced and leave your family?", which is what she is very tempted to do. She's clearly not very happy within the relationship and yet she doesn't want to leave it. Her husband's put her in such a moral fever, she thinks divorce isn't really an option. It's so clearly a big sacrifice to her and a huge compromise to think, 'OK, for the next however many years I'm going to stay here'. P: Don't you think a lot of people would think 'why the hell doesn't she just get out?' NH: I think an awful lot of people are both troubled by their relationships and troubled by the thought of leaving them. People say, "well I'm going to stay here until my children are 18 or 19". There is an acknowledgement of unhappiness and imperfection, which can be corrected perhaps at some stage, but in the meantime involves an awful lot of sacrifice. I suppose I am sufficiently old-fashioned to believe that the notion of having children should at least involve some kind of self-sacrifice. P: Did anything about the process of writing and reading come into conjunction with thoughts of how to be good? NH: The book comes up with no answers, and cannot. I think it's really the first time that I've been aware that it's not necessary to try and answer the questions that you pose. As long they are posed with some complexity, and they make people think, it's simpleminded, really, to try and answer everything that you raise yourself. P: The narrator of How to be Good is having an affair. She could of course have been swept off her feet and had a grand sexual passion, but the sex in the book is pretty downbeat. NH: Katie has sex, but in terms of the affair Stephen is a rather hopeless character. He came in at a stage of her life where she was flattered by the attention, but, yes, I think the sex in the book is comic and flat. P: Is that because you don't believe that sex can be a grand and overpowering passion that can change people's lives, or because you're dramatizing a particular character in this case? NH: I think dramatizing particular characters in this case, but I think that it would give the book a different tone if the sex had completely swept her off her feet. I don't particularly enjoy writing about sex. I think it's really hard to write about sex in a way that's interesting or meaningful. I can't think of a passage about sex in a book that has made an awful lot of sense to me. I think it's a private thing and its joys are almost inexpressible on the page, and within the confines of the comic novel I think it can be particularly difficult. P: It does seem that Katie has a particular guilt which perhaps women suffer from more than men do - juggling an important job at the same time as bringing up the children. Do you think that's still a major thing in women's lives? NH: I think it's increasingly becoming an issue. The particular situation with Katie and David is that Katie is the breadwinner, and her work is more important than David's. But she is also a mother and I think to most families the crucial relationship is between mother and children, and yet the mother in this case is absent more often. I do think that that places women in a very difficult situation, and a lot of them do feel slightly stricken about it and haven't really managed to sort it out in their heads, even if they've sorted it out very well in their day-to-day lives. P: I think the children are really interesting. The book seems to touch on emotions that are not often dealt with in books - that it is possible for parents to feel that their children are not completely wonderful 100% of the time. NH: It's interesting because there were many debates in the editorial process about whether a woman would ever say she does not like her children. In fact I remember reading Alison Lurie's The War Between The Tates, and there's very clearly a sense in there that this woman's children are a great disappointment to her in their teenage years - they are an older Molly and Tom. There's an endless circular argument about whether, as a male author, I have made a mistake in projecting these feelings onto a mother. I mean we all know enough about parenting now to be able to confess that sometimes we'd rather not have to do it. P: I suppose there comes a time in a parent's life when you realise that this child is becoming something separate and possibly, entirely different from you. It's quite a shock of recognition and if you're honest about it, there may well be things you don't like in that different person. NH: I think if you look at any family, or anyone you know, there are certain family relationships that just don't work. I know lots of people who are not very close to their siblings - they were very close when they were younger but they've grown up into different people. There is a terrible pressure of guilt that makes us feel that we must love and like our parents, our children, and our brothers and sisters, and of course there is no real logic behind that. The idea that you must automatically empathise with a close blood relative I think is preposterous. Frances Barber is the voice of wife, mother, doctor and all-round good person, Katie Carr in the audiobook of How to be Good. Here she tells us about the experience. Penguin.co.uk: Why did you want to read How to be Good? Frances Barber: I am a massive Nick Hornby fan and although he perhaps is perceived as being more of a lad's writer he is witty and canny and obviously likes and sympathises with women. All his females have to put up with these hopeless boys and their obsessions and yet he avoids making them sanctimonious. I was thrilled to be invited to get to read his new novel before anyone else and I have now recommended it to all my girlfriends. I think it's his most considered and most accomplished to date. P: Much has been made of the fact that this is Nick Hornby's first novel with a female protagonist. Do you think Hornby was successful in his portrayal or did you ever feel your Katie was battling with his male-perspective Katie? FB: Katie is not only someone I completely recognise but she's the sort of woman I would like to have as a friend. I read Hornby's audiobook with fewer mistakes than I have ever read anything and that can only be because I was so inside her head that the thoughts and dialogue just flew out of my mouth as if they were improvised observations of my own. I never heard a male perception in her comments and internal battles; it was like having a conversation with myself. It's a triumph of empathy that reminds me of the character of Anna I played in Patrick Marber's play Closer in which I was staggered by Patrick's knowledge and sympathy with a real woman I knew as well as I know myself. P: How far could you identify with Katie and her moral dilemmas? Did you find yourself siding sometimes with Katie and sometimes with her husband David, the man actively searching for what it means to be 'good'? FB: Because Katie is such a complicated and totally believable creation, she allows herself self-doubt throughout the book. As the story unfolds she changes her mind about David and his new foibles because she also is suffering a moral dilemma about their lifestyle and Islington-dwelling affluence. They are a perfect example of the Blairite nation we have evolved into, seemingly without realising that we have lost our old beliefs. It is an incisive and brilliantly observed rap on the knuckles for all of us who find ourselves in this New Labour world without questioning how or why we arrived here. Consequently I found I was siding with both the irrational response of David and the realistic approach of Katie. Katie won, but I think that says a lot more about me than it does about the moral argument at the heart of the book.