Katie Carr is a doctor married to the angriest man in Holloway. Even though she’s having an affair and doesn’t always care as much about her patients as she thinks she ought to, she’s secure in the knowledge that she is a good person. Of course she’s a good person. She’s a doctor.
But when her husband David meets a spiritual healer who takes all his anger away, and David turns into the neighborhood do-gooder, Katie suddenly feels a crisis of self. Does she have to love her neighbor that much in order to be a good person? How far does one draw the line?
This is a novel about what it means to be in the middle of a marriage, when the romance is gone but you have many years ahead of you. This is also a novel about what it means to be middle class, when you’re not the richest person in the world, but there are a lot of people worse off. It’s about what happens when people have a crisis of faith when they’re the sort of people who don’t know what church they go to.
I liked that this novel was about people finding their way and trying to figure out how to be good people, yet it touched on these subjects without getting preachy or religious. I also liked that David and GoodNews were weird enough to be funny, without becoming completely absurd. Well, maybe other people will find them unbelieveable and absurd, but I’ve met a lot of people like that (without the supernatural powers, that is.)
The characters are solidly built. Katie is believably flawed, and even her children are real people, rather than robotic mannikins. The homeless kids that David and GoodNews try to help aren’t just Dickensian paragons of pathos, but are as varied as the other characters.
Hornby can be darkly funny at moments. More than once, I laughed out loud at his sense of humor. (Like when the daughter asks her parents if they’re going to get divorced, and her mom says “not if you’re good.”)I also liked that it was so very British. Some books set in England could be set anywhere, but for this one, I felt like I wanted to keep a running glossary of new terms (Barmy? What does that mean?).
It’s an amusing novel, with a decent pace, and good characters. Except for an ending that seemed a little off (one of those deeply symbolic things that I’m sure a college literature class would love, but I didn’t get it.), it’s a solidly built novel. This is a novel for people who like novels, a novel for people who are or want to read about middle age.
I think the only reason why I didn’t love it more is that it’s kind of a novel in the middle, as well as being about the middle. I kind of prefer novels that touch a little more on highs and lows: torrid romance rather than a begrudging desire to maybe try to make a marriage work, passionate arguments rather than weak puns, death and tragedy rather than pathetic men who don’t know how to cook.
Still, it’s solidly written, fairly charming, and funny. I recommend it for people who like novels about adult subjects, about people who like novels set in England, and for people who want liberal intellectuals mocked in a gentle way.
