The 37-year-old narrator is a doctor, the family breadwinner. That particular assessment will now have to be revised, clearly.

Even though I am, apparently, and to my immense surprise, the kind of person who tells her husband that she doesn’t want to be married to him anymore, I really didn’t think that I was the kind of person to say so in a car park, on a mobile phone. He’s at home, looking after the kids, and I have only called him to remind him that he should write a note for Molly’s class teacher. David isn’t even in the car park with me. I am in a car park in Leeds when I tell my husband I don’t want to be married to him anymore. I suspect not.Īs that quote indicates, this is a first-person novel and when we meet the 37-year-old narrator (the author keeps her name hidden until well into the book - it’s a symbol of her lack of concete identity - so I won’t use it) she has just reached a tipping point in terms of the role that regret plays in her life:

And I’m not sure that there is a cure for regret. Me, I made it to about thirty-seven, and David made it to the same age, and my brother gave up the ghost even before that. And we can’t stave it off forever, because it is impossible not to make the mistakes that let regret in, but the best of us manage to limp on into our sixties or seventies before we succumb. The trick, it seems to me, is to stave off regret. This quote comes from late in the book but, at that point, it serves as a summary for the reader of everything that has gone before (and indeed the entire book) and I don’t think represents a spoiler: While Grant (and Johnathan Franzen in Freedom) use their subject families as a staging ground for a wide-ranging, outward examination of the societal forces at play, Hornby takes the opposite approach to the same environment: an introspective look at how those forces play out with a particular couple, their challenges and the resulting life. That’s pretty much where the direct comparison ends, however.

While this novel was published ten years ago, it does share some elements with Grant’s new novel - most particularly, its central theme is how a couple (and their children) cope with the pressures of the latter half of the last century on their relationship. My recent review of Linda Grant’s We Had It So Good produced comments from three different sources that they rated Hornby’s How To Be Good highly (and I don’t think it was just the similar title) so I moved it right to the top of the pile. Purchased at Chapters.caNick Hornby is one of those authors whose name I have been aware of for a while, but never was tempted to pick up - his books have always been well-reviewed but those positive reviews left me thinking that his approach just didn’t mesh with my tastes.

How to be good by nick hornby