Danny ChaiI’m a big Nick Hornby fan. I’ve only read three of his books, but each one has made me laugh out loud and has struck me with deep insights. That’s talented writing. And he writes like I would want to write, with accessible language, like someone is talking to you. In fact, that’s the tone I go for in my blog and, when I was younger wrote them, my letters. That it sound like I’m talking to you, not high and distanced. His writing therefore represents my writing ideal: accessible, conversational, funny, and profound.
In particular, High Fidelity is, to me, a near perfect novel. Laugh out loud funny, strikingly thoughtful. I’ve written this before, but the amazing thing about that book is how there are equally compelling insights at the beginning and the end of the novel that are opposed to one another. He goes through a growth process and arrives at a different place from where he started, but has insights in each place that aren’t compatible. That’s just amazing. Lots of books have insights that are essentially the author’s. To have different insights in the same book – that’s a gift.
Anyway, How To Be Good is the worst Hornby book I’ve read. 1 star. It’s only saved from 0 stars by the first 1/3 of the book, which is amazing, and full of the Hornby stuff I love – humor and penetrating insight. Which only makes the rest of book that much more disappointing. It’s rambling, tedious almost to the extreme, with a truly awful ending. I was ecstatic reading the first third of the book, but after reading the last page I was angry.
That first third is amazing, though, because he so richly and accurate captures the negative parts of marriage. I was talking to a friend over break and he mentioned how his daughters are best friends. “Do they fight?” I asked, thinking that if they’re best friends, they must not.
He responded, “All the time.” As he explained, even if they fought just 10% of the time, when they’re always together, that comes out to hours of fighting every day. That’s true. And to love someone 90% of the time is a lot. A.J. Jacobs also wrote in that article about Radical Honesty about how he was hesitant to be fully honest with his wife, because he loved her 90% of the time and hated her 10% of the time, so why hurt her during the minority of time when he hated her instead of just letting it pass?
The point is, in any relationship, no matter how good, there are times of negativity. And the book captures what that looks like in a long-term relationship. It’s a little extreme. But everyone can relate I think. To how bad habits, emotions, communication patterns harden in a relationship over time like scar tissue. And it becomes like a dance, where we fall into patterns over and over that we know lead to a bad end, but we do them anyway partly because inertia is so hard to break, and partly because there’s some comfort in certainty, even when that certainty is boring or bad. He nails it.
If the book were about a marriage gone bad and how they dealt with it; basically, if it were the first third of the book for the entire book, it would probably have been fantastic. But it isn’t that. And the book sucked.