Hornby's latest novel delivers the goods

It's all been leading up to this. In his previous three books, Nick Hornby struggled with the question of how to be good, but he's done it in the narrow, self-absorbed way that characterizes many first-person, semi-autobiographical novelists.

COURTESY RIVERHEAD BOOKS "...or you can read the Bible, but that doesn't get funny 'till Revelations..."

The memoir Fever Pitch chronicles Hornby's struggle to be a good (actually, rabidly obsessive) Arsenal fan while also trying to build a good life and land a good job. In his first novel, High Fidelity, Hornby writes of a man trying to be a good friend, a good boyfriend, and a good son—and nearly failing simply because he's far too worried about being a good fan of great music. About a Boy's main character, Will Freeman, spends the book discovering that he can be entirely self-absorbed while still doing good things and filling his life with good people.

Despite the commercial success of these books, they were written for target audiences: parts of Fever Pitch are undoubtedly lost on people who know nothing about soccer, and those who have never visited a snobby independent record shop might not appreciate a great deal of High Fidelity's humor. With How to Be Good, Hornby has written a more universal novel, one that deals with issues of family, love, friendship, and responsibility, yet he has done so while retaining his gift for absurd humor and sharp observation.

In many ways, How to Be Good is Hornby's least personal book, and not simply because his first-person narrator is a woman. It also steps away from the music fans, sports fans, and the mysteriously unemployed that have always seemed to be reflections of Hornby himself. The world of How to Be Good is filled with doctors, children, the mentally ill, and the spiritually unbalanced, and it is with these characters that Hornby has written his most challenging and thought-provoking work to date.

Throughout the novel, the on-the-rocks marriage of narrator Katie, a doctor, and her husband, David, provides a framework for the jarring changes happening in her life. In the first chapter, after Katie asks David for a divorce over a cell phone in a parking lot, we find that she has been having an affair. Almost simultaneously, we discover that David, formerly the writer of a column entitled "The Angriest Man in Holloway," has impulsively visited a faith healer for his chronic back problems and has been persuaded by this healer to become a sickening version of a saint.

David's overnight transformation from cynical grouch to candidate for U.N. Goodwill Ambassador, needless to say, takes Katie by surprise, and it sends her into something of a tailspin as she starts to question her own morals. As David's attempts to be good (and unwavering belief in his own righteousness) start disrupting her family, her friends, and, in a particularly comic bit, her entire block, Katie is forced to confront whether or not David's form of goodness is really the kind of goodness that leads one to be a good person.

Katie struggles to deal with David's near-dementia, and she continually tells herself that she is in fact a good person, but one can tell that she doubts it. She wonders whether simply being a doctor who helps sick people, a mother who provides for her children, and a wife who loves her husband is really enough. She tries desperately to find some validation in her life, but nothing makes her feel like a good person.

What's surprising is that when How to Be Good reaches this point of moral futility, it ends. Some will call this a letdown, some will call it a cop-out, but it actually is a courageous move. Literature professors would probably dry-heave at a book without a resolution, but Hornby's gift has never been in the realm of high art; instead, his books, his chapters, even his sentences are a little bit like pop songs that speak to a person who would never have thought to say something quite the same way.

Hornby's books have always taken place in real life, and in real life there are very few resolutions. Much like Katie, we keep on living, constantly unsure of our own goodness but always aware of the distinct possibility that we will simply never know.

The title How to Be Good is ironic, then, since it promises the reader the answers of a self-help book while finally leaving us with more questions than when we began. If that isn't the sign of a great book, what is?

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