Deciding that a life of bile is not for him, he becomes very good, very quickly. David's aching back is miraculously cured by a Finsbury Park faith healer called GoodNews, and thereafter his soul also undergoes a complete transformation. Having fervently wished for a different husband, Katie gets one, with Hornby invoking the old chestnut that tells us to be careful what we wish for. We proceed from A to B via a rather startling reductio ad absurdum. At the start of the novel, Katie, emboldened by a lacklustre affair, brandishes divorce in a reckless, momentary attraction to Mutually Assured Destruction by its end, she has been forced to contemplate the implications of her desire to be free of what she imagines constrains her. He and Katie loathe one another, but are prevented from separation by Tom and Molly, their two children, and by what one might call habitual codependency. So disillusioned and grumpy is he that he writes a local newspaper column on the subject, berating pensioners for not having their change ready when they board buses and lambasting contemporary theatre. Katie is a GP, and therefore unassailably good, while David is The Angriest Man In Holloway. But despite such a universal theme, it is nothing if not culturally specific: the modern world has been deliberately shrunk to encompass Guardian -reading professionals in north London. As its title suggests, How to Be Good considers the problem of virtue and, as a GCSE question might frame it, Its Place in the Modern World.
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