etc.

I liked but did not love this book. It is mildly amusing not “raucously funny”, cleverish not “fearless”, and remotely annoying not “shrewd.” Of course, the references here are to some of the words of acclaim that have been showered upon this book by reviewers. I think this might have something to do with my reaction to Hornby: he is skilled and entertaining, but I’m certainly not eating him up with a spoon like most are. This one is told from the perspective of Katie, a seemingly unexotic middle-class GP, mother, and wife who lives in London with her husband and two children. When the novel opens, Katie is obviously unhappy in her marriage to a jaded, acrimonious man called David, and her one wish is to hold on to the accoutrements of her middle class life, but have David become a different person, less bitter, less poisonous. And he does. He goes though some sort of spiritual conversion at the hands of DJ GoodNews, a thirty-something healer who achieved his powers at the height of an acid-trip gone wrong. So David goes from being an unbearably sarcastic git to being an unbearably sanctimonious git, and this is where a lot of my annoyance with this book kicked in. For most of the novel Katie feels powerless and incompetent to discuss David’s newfound “goodness” on any sort of intellectual level, so a lot of well-meaning but utterly unrealistic charitable deeds are contrived and carried out to largely disastrous ends. It is only about 5 pages from the end of the last chapter that Katie musters enough gumption to voice her opinion, but by then I had been annoyed with both her and David for at least 200 pages, so her outburst was a bit too little far too late. If you manage to stay more charitable to Katie’s cause, and find both bitter David and good David funny and maybe a little interesting, you will probably enjoy this book more than I did. (swap)