A few weeks ago I volunteered to lead a discussion group at SMU on Nick Hornby's How to be Good. SMU invites entering students to participate in these groups before the semester starts as a sort of academic appetizer. This week I read the book to prepare for leading the discussion next fall.

Too close to home?

This was almost—but not quite—my first encounter with Hornby. My wife and I both love the film version of About a Boy, though we've never read the book. She started to read How to be Good several years ago, but put it down when it hit too close to home. Our marriage was struggling at the time. We were living in England. It felt like the emotional emanations of the book would resonate with our own and swell them into something worse.

So I approached the book with a mixture of interest and unease. Hornby has a stellar reputation as a storyteller; the endorsements that litter the book's cover simply gush ("How to be bloody marvelous," says The Mail on Sunday); and what I gathered of the book's premise intrigued me. But would it dredge up painful memories of the dark times in my marriage?

Flavors of Good

The book's title frames its central question: How, indeed, to be good? But "good"—as the story reveals—is a slippery word, with many possible meanings. There are the moral questions: What sort of person is a "good" person? What sort of deed is a "good" deed? And then there are the existential questions: What sort of life is the "good" life? Can anyone ever feel truly happy? What—if anything—makes living worthwhile?

Another question lurks beneath these, and in some ways overshadows them: Which of these questions—the moral or the existential—most appeals to me? Am I driven by the desire to live right or to live well? If I want to know how to be good, I must first decide whether good means righteous or happy.

Katie Carr's Cul-de-Sac

At first glance, How to be Good seems too gentle a story to be diving into such thorny issues. It centers on Katie Carr, a forty year old doctor in a North London suburb whose marriage has collapsed like a bad lung. She takes little pleasure in life, least of all in her sneering, sarcastic husband David, a semi-employed writer. Her friends talk at her rather than with her. Her children hardly know her. Recently, she has taken a lover; but she realizes he gives her thrills rather than satisfaction or even real pleasure. She has reached a midlife cul-de-sac. Yet her wry, insightful, and often funny narration brightens these dark themes.

The crisis takes a new turn when David changes dramatically—miraculously—for the better. He gives up writing his weekly rant for the local newspaper. He becomes meek, loving, and considerate. He apologizes for failing to love her. Yet her delight at this transformation is dulled by the eerie abruptness with which it came about.

A faith healer with the curious name DJ GoodNews emerges as the one responsible for David's transformation. Though Katie is skeptical of GoodNews at first, she is forced to recognize his gifts when she sees him perform a miraculous healing. Soon GoodNews comes to live in the Carr household, and David and he begin to plan how to spread their vision of love and charity for everyone. Katie comes face to face with "good."

But philanthropy is not the same thing as love, as Katie discovers when her saintly husband grows more and more remote. The question of how to be good proves more nuanced than any of them had reckoned upon.

The book explores its themes with wit, warmth, and insight. It's a delight to read, likable and engrossing. And the questions it poses about morality, marriage, family, and religion are important and universal.

Is Family Enough?

So far I've been giving you a book review, the long and short of which is: If you haven't read this book, read it. But now I'm going to assume you've already read the book, because I want to talk about its most controversial feature: the last sentence.

Spoilers ahoy.

If you found the book's last sentence jarring—maybe even disturbing—a quick google for "hornby good last sentence" will show you're not alone. It ends the book like a slap in the face: sharp, sudden, painful, unexpected. Why did Hornby put it there, and was he wise to do so?

If you look back over the last several pages before the end, you'll see the resolutions that Katie Carr makes to give meaning to her life. She must take time to be alone, to read, to rediscover her spirit. In the very last page, she hesitantly accepts her family as the core of her life, the thing that will give coherence and meaning. The tone of the last several pages is one of dogged optimism—indeed, much of the book's overall charm is Katie's enduring sense of "things are hard but we'll work them out somehow." The last sentence violently departs from that charm. The optimism is gone. We're left with the sense that although Katie may resolve to find meaning in family, in the back of her mind she'll always know that nothing means anything.

The last sentence hurts because it terminates a hopeful book in a hopeless way. It's as if Abraham Lincoln had ended the Gettysburg Address with, "Or whatever."

You can pinpoint down to the semicolon the moment Hornby decided the book was ending too brightly. This is his failure in writing the last sentence: it simply doesn't ring true. It doesn't sound like Katie: it sounds like Hornby manipulating the reader, and judging from his impeccable narration in the rest of the book, I would think he'd know better. What drove him to do it?

Imagine the book without the jarring ending and you begin to see why he included it. Without it, the book could easily end on too sugary a note. The reader could come away thinking, "Yes, despite all the problems and moral compromises, family makes everything worthwhile." This idea gives us warm fuzzies, but it fails to answer the real complexities. Family is valuable, but it doesn't make life worth living. Without faith in a transcendent reality—and this is precisely what Katie doubts in the end—it's very difficult, perhaps impossible, to imagine a life worth living. A fun life, perhaps; a survived life, yes; but a meaningful life—how can you get one without God?

Astronomers say the sun will plump into a red giant several million years from now and swallow up the earth and everything we've ever known. What meaning will our lives have had then? Today, we might find meaning in our experiences and sensations. We might find meaning in helping our fellow human beings. We might find meaning in being remembered by our children and grandchildren, or even by history books and archives. But eventually our grandchildrens' grandchildren will forget us, and somewhere down the line humankind will be destroyed, or will evolve into something with little regard for our pesky lives. Where will our meaning be then?

Perhaps I'm projecting into Hornby's intentions; perhaps I'm being overgenerous to his insight as a writer; but I think his last sentence is intended as a blunt reminder that all sentiment aside, there are no easy answers, especially in a world without God.

What You Find in the Night Sky

Did How to be Good dredge up dark memories for me? I'll admit I recognized many of the emotions and events that David and Katie experience in their marriage. Indeed, like David, I underwent a profound transformation just in time to help my marriage turn around. Though my rebirth didn't happen overnight (it took months, even years—in fact it's still going on), it was helped along by miracles, and spiritual people acted as midwives. So I saw in the book some resemblance to my life, but it didn't pain me.

The book's nihilism did pain me. It pains me when people take God's existence for granted in either direction—either vacuous faith that "he must be there" or vacuous denial that "nothing's there." God—the mere concept of God—deserves more careful treatment than that. Hornby's faith healer gets his power from drugs. His clergywoman is burned out, incompetent, faithless. God's irrelevance is simply assumed—and you know when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME.

By not seriously engaging with the question of God, Hornby tips his hand, showing that his is a book reveling in postmodern angst, not grieving it or seeking to escape it. Angst is fashionable these days. Many people see something romantic in the compelling futility of the search for meaning. They would, as I once did, rather search than find—rather lick their wounds than see them healed.

Unlike Katie, I looked into the night sky and found that God was not only there but near. I wish I could tell you what is the difference between those who look and find and those who look and don't find. I suspect those who don't find don't look very hard.

Labels: books