Ranting to /dev/null

Hungering and Thirsting for Righteousness

I finished reading Nick Hornby's How To Be Good this morning. This guy just can't miss. His perceptions are simply brilliant. The whole thing is a discussion of wanting to be "good," to be a good person, combated by a selfishness so powerful as to defy language. For those who don't know, the book differs from Hornby's About A Boy and High Fidelity, in two significant ways. First, the protagonist is married with children. Second, she is a woman. It is also by far the most religious of his works, and the least given to being retold as a romantic comedy suitable for wide-release. So I felt slightly disconnected from the action, unlike his previous two which concern single-ish men. Nonetheless, what I think is the major theme of the book was impossible to miss.

I believe that How To Be Good just exudes the kind of hunger and thirst for "being good," a.k.a. being righteous, that Christians are supposed to experience. The main character, Katie Carr, feels a terrible, root-level longing for righteousness, matched only by her crushing consciousness that nothing she does has ever or will ever satisfy that longing. I think this just exposes what Luther described as an "alien" righteousness. It's alien not only because it originates outside us, but because it is so foreign and opposed to everything that we are. It is our opposite. And in Christ, our status.

Another major difference between this book and Hornby's previous ones is that the ending is not a happy one. (For those of you who plan on reading the book, you might want to stop here, because the following is the last paragraph.) It concludes with:

My family, I think, just that. And then, I can do this. I can live this life. I can, I can. It's a spark I want to cherish, a splutter of life in the flat battery; but just at the wrong moment I catch a glimpse of the night sky behind David, and I can see that there's nothing out there at all.

Katie has just about reached the point of being able to cope, of being satisfied with her goodness and her ability to live the life she has chosen/had forced upon her. But misses it. And knows it. And that's the end of the book. Sheer genius.

Along the way, Hornby offers up a rather scathing critique of both standard bourgious methods of attaining righteousness and some of the more common "spiritual" methods, such as sheltering the homeless, forgiving one's enemies, giving all one has to the poor, and making an effor to love (read as be courteous and kind to) one's family and neighbors. Hornby has a bit of this exactly right, as he actually quites from Corithians 13, saying that without love all of these are nothing. But he doesn't - can't - see what this is. By the end of the book, humanity's need for something so completely outside our realm of experience is so blazingly clear that it almost hurts.

I can't wait for Hornby's next one.

Posted by ryan at September 10, 2003 04:41 PM | TrackBack