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How To Be Good ::
What is it about spiritual crises? They seem to seek out the best of us. We, the members of the upper-middle class, spend all our lives being self-interested, materialistic, and neglectful of other people; we surround ourselves with unquestioning friends with whom we have in common the same short-sighted, selfish goals, we get expensive educations that lead you to a well-paying careers that allow us to lavish ourselves (our families) with the latest luxuries; we don’t so much deny the existence of God so much as we just make any questions of spirituality completely irrelevant; in short, we do everything we can to protect ourselves from eventually freaking out about the fact that our lives have no meaning. Yet eventually, the crisis finds us.
And that crisis finds Katie and David, a quintessential young, middle-class couple living in London. It finds them at the time when David’s foundering writing career is about to sink and Katie’s dissatisfaction with her marriage has led her to pursue an affair with another man and ask David, over a cellular phone, for a divorce. Soon after that, a searing back pain forces David to be cared for by a faith healer (he seems to have had a thing against the medical profession). Suddenly, where he was once sarcastic and mean-spirited, he is now good-natured and kind, interested more in social justice than in criticizing what he sees as cultural stupidity. He cares about feeding the poor and sheltering the homeless and generally making this world less cruel place in which to live. This epiphany also leads David to claim the moral high-ground in his relationship with Katie, which, as a medical doctor and the real breadwinner of the two of them, was once a position she’d been quite comfortable with. It also forces Katie further question her worth, which further threatens her already fragile emotional state. (At one point, she even goes to church!)
But really, the idea behind How To Be Good is a respectable one. The idea is this. It is easy for us to be comfortable with our “liberal moralism” when we get ourselves into a position where our beliefs are unchallenged; it becomes difficult when someone starts questioning us. That’s exactly what happened with Katie when David suddenly discovered the meaning of his existence. But the problem with the book is that Hornby tries to communicate this concept without making tangible the spiritual and emotional worth of his characters, and as a result, I found them at best uninteresting, at worst, self-righteous or self-interested, and always bordering on loathsome. If you’re going to have the question of characters' moralism, beliefs, and spirituality as a major issue in the book, it helps if you make characters that have some redeeming characteristics to them.
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