Fiction 8. Biography

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NICK HORNBY HowToBeGood .»' 2: ‘v .0.

hen Nick Hornby shot to fame

with football diary Fever Pitch

and later recorded a music enthusiasts obsessions in High Fidelity, he touched many a raw nerve. These days, he's just getting on them. Like the Tory Party of the Thatcher years, Hornby appears to be obsessed with the notion of family, while the reality of it all is that he only really cares for the individual.

Previously, his central character‘s relationships were incapable of being conducted in an adult fashion because of an inadvisable emphasis in life on such immature pursuits as football or music. With About A Boy and How To Be Good, his narrators can’t keep it together due to some nebulously dull notion of ‘growing up’.

In his new novel, this wishy-washy character motivation is encapsulated within respectable doctor Katie Carr, who kicks off proceedings in a Leeds car park to phone up her annoying husband David and ask for a divorce. She‘s having an affair but insists that she is not a bad person. And insists and insists. To anyone who cares to listen. And many who don't. Which frankly, is most of us.

Among this cast of drearies is DJ GoodNews, a £200-per-session quack who cures David‘s bad back; Kate’s best mate Becca, whose idea of listening to another’s problems is to rant about herself all evening; and then there’s the maltreated spouse, a local newspaper columnist who goes under the moniker ‘Angriest Man in Holloway whose tedious loathing of liberalism

comes under question when he starts acting like one. In trying to avoid the obvious accusations of churning out the same old lower-middle-class male whinging dressed up as complex sign-of—the-times ambiguities, Nick Hornby has pulled off the almighty coup of making his narrative voice a female. Brilliant. Except, much of the tale is told not with drive or wit or, somewhat surprisingly, much intelligence; rather, our heroine more

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In trying to be good, Hornby has hit a bad patch

often than not sounds like a gossiping harridan: one sentence breathlessly uses the word ‘and‘ six times.

Why Hornby, who appears to have hit the kind of barren patch which is now afflicting his beloved Arsenal, would make a North London GP sound like a spotty Steps fan is unclear. But whatever he is up to, he is certainly making mugs out of his own admirers. (Brian Donaldson)

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First writes

Putting debut novelists under the microscope. This Issue: Ruar/dh Nico/l

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