How to Be Good (Nick Hornby) ***** troubling good
A few years ago I read a newspaper story about a senior accountant who started giving away all his money because it was the right and rational thing to do. They quoted his wife saying, "It wasn't the first 2 million that was hard to give up, it was the last $90,000, when we had to move to a smaller house and could no longer afford the kinds of restaurants our friends liked." Then the accountant heard about a stranger who needed a kidney, so he donated his kidney too.
Taking this reasoning to its end point, the altruistic accountant should work overtime and never retire. Every day he works could build a house for a displaced family in Darfur! And if you weigh each buying decision against what that money would otherwise be able to do, you wouldn't ever buy a potted plant because that $10 could feed a Cambodian family for a month. Life becomes unlivable!
Anyway, maybe Nick Hornby read the same story, because this book is about the smart and liberal Katie (a doctor for the National Health Service) and her sarcastic husband David (writes a column called "The Angriest Man in Holloway"). Their marriage is falling apart, and one day David passive-aggressively visits a druggie spiritual healer named DJ GoodNews and gets healed. The new David starts really thinking about what it means to be a liberal. He starts giving away money and campaigning for everyone in their neighborhood to take in a street kid. Their family was falling apart before, but now they're in the fast lane to destruction.
If I'd written this book, it'd be a boring account of David's half-baked do-gooding, but How to Be Good is enormous fun with plenty of surprise twists. Like the king's fool, How to Be Good uses humor as a license to ask thorny questions, and it makes the if-I-had-a-book-club list. We'd all like to be "good" but actually following through with a whole effort just about tears life apart.
Here's a bit from when Katie discovers that her son, Tom, has started stealing at school after David gives away half of the kids' toys.
"Why isn't it your fault?" I ask Tom.
"'Cos it's Dad's fault. And GoodNews's."
"They stole that stuff?"
"No. But they made me steal it."
"They made you. How did they make you?"
"You know how they made me."
"Tell me."
"They've been depriving me."
"And what does 'depriving' mean?"
"Like those kids at school. You said they were deprived."
He asked me once why a certain group of boys at his school were always in trouble, and I--perhaps, in retrospect, unwisely--introduced the concept of deprivation. I thought I was doing my duty as a right-thinking mother; it turned out that I was merely providing mitigation for my own son's criminality.
"That's different."
"Why is it?"
"Because..."
"You said they didn't have very much at home, and that's why they got in trouble. And now I haven't got very much at home. And that's why I'm getting in trouble."
"You don't think you've got very much at home."
"Not any more I haven't."
I'm becoming heartily sick of liberalism. It's complicated, and tiring, and open to misinterpretation and abuse by...by sneaky, spoiled children.