Winner of the WH Smith Fiction Award 2002
Mother, doctor, wife...that’s got to be good, hasn’t it? And not just ‘nice’ good, but ‘Good’ good - as in right, and true and worthy...
Katie Carr has always thought she was a fairly decent citizen, a reasonable human being (it’s why she became a GP, after all, to help people, to cure and comfort), a loving mother - and a patient wife to David (self-styled ‘angriest man in Holloway’). So what happens when Katie finds herself having an affair - that can’t be ‘good’ - and there are whispers of divorce in the air? This might all be unsettling enough - but on top of it all, David has been to see DJ GoodNews, a healer who has seemingly transformed David from his usual sarcastic, ranting self, to a philanthropist, a humanitarian, a...maddeningly good person. David has not just adopted a pure-of-thought, love-your-family form of decency - but has managed to go straight to give-away-your-belongings, house-the-homeless, universal-love mode. This is fairly large-scale goodness - so why are the Katie and the children finding it so confusing, so infuriating?
Can Katie make sense of it all - of David, and of herself? It had its tricky moments when it was just the two of them in the relationship...will GoodNews be their saviour, or the last straw?
In Katie, in all her fallibility and curiosity and hopes, we have a sympathetic narrator - and in our identification with her, we can’t help but ask the same hard questions she asks herself. All this though, is delivered with Hornby’s customary deadpan humour. This is an incredibly engaging - and uncompromising - portrayal of family life, of marriage and of the values that motor our daily lives. Hornby doesn’t crowd out his novel with answers, but the questions that come tumbling forth, and the feelings prodded - whether by humour, or anger, or sadness - are satisfaction enough. Should we, can we, and how do we hang on to each other in this muddled world?
[Hornby] writes with a funny, fresh voice which skewers male and female foibles with hilarious accuracy'
Guardian
'He should write for England'
Observer
'Hornby's aim is true....like all good comic writers, Hornby uses joke to confront more deeply, not side-step'
Daily Telegraph
'Hornby is a writer who dares to be witty, intelligent and emotionally generous all at once'
The New York Times
I come home from work and David almost skips out of his office to greet me.
< br>I come home from work and David almost skips out of his office to greet me. 'Look,' he says, and then proceeds to bow at me vigorously, as if I were the Queen and he were some kind of lunatic royalist.
'What?'
'My back. I don't feel anything. Not a twinge.'
'Did you go to see Dan Silverman?' Dan Silverman is an osteopath that we recommend at the surgery, and I've been telling David to see him for months. Years, probably.
'No.'
'So what happened?'
'I saw someone else.'
'Who?'
'This guy.'
'Which guy?'
'This guy in Finsbury Park.'
'In Finsbury Park?' Dan Silverman has a practice in Harley Street: There is no Harley Street equivalent in Finsbury Park, as far as I know. 'How did you find him?'
'Newsagent's window.'
'A newsagent's window? What qualifications has he got?'
'None whatsoever.' Information delivered with a great deal of pride and aggression, inevitably. Medical qualifications belong on my side of the great marital divide, and are therefore to be despised. 'So you let someone completely unqualified mess around with your back. Smart decision, David. He's probably crippled you for 1ife.'
David starts to bow again. 'Do I look like someone who's been crippled?'
'Not today, no. But nobody can cure a bad back in one session.'
'Yeah, well. GoodNews has.'
<p>'What good news?'
'That's his name. GoodNews. Capital G, capital N, all one word. DJ GoodNews, actually. To give him his full title.'
'DJ Not Dr.'
'It's, you know, a clubby thing. I think he used to work in a disco or something.'
'Always useful when you're treating back complaints. Anyway. You went to see someone called GoodNews.'
'I didn't know he was called GoodNews when I went to see him.' 'Out of interest, what did his advert say?'
'Something like, I don't know. "Bad Back? I can cure you in one session." And then his telephone number.'
'And that impressed you?'
'Yeah. Of course. Why mess around?'
I'm presuming this GoodNews person isn't some sort of alternative therapist.' It may not surprise you to learn that David has not, up until this point, been a big fan of alternative medicine of any kind; he has argued forcefully, both to me and to the readers of his newspaper column, that he's not interested in any kind of cure that isn't harmful to small children and pregnant women, and that anyone who suggests anything different is a moron. (David, incidentally, is rabidly conservative in everything but politics. There are people like that now, I've noticed, people who seem angry enough to call for the return of the death penalty or the repatriation of Afro-Caribbeans, but who won't, because, like just about everybody else in our particular postal district, they're liberals, so their anger has to come out through different holes. You can read them in the columns and the letters pages of our liberal newspapers every day, being angry about films they don't like or comedians they don't think are funny or women who wear headscarves. Sometimes I think life would be easier for David and me if he experienced a violent political conversion, and he could be angry about poofs and communists, instead of homeopaths and old people on buses and restaurant critics. It must be very unsatisfying to have such tiny outlets for his enormous torrent of rage.)
'I dunno what you'd call him.'
'Did he give you drugs?'
'Nope.'
'I thought that was your definition of alternative. Someone who doesn't give you drugs.'
'The point is, he's fixed me. Unlike the useless NHS.'
' And how many times did you try the useless NHS?'
'No point. They're useless.'
'So what did this guy do?'
'Just rubbed my back a bit with some Deep Heat and sent me on my way. Ten minutes.'
'How much?'
'Two hundred quid.'
I look at him. 'You're kidding.'
Author interviews
