Rod Stewart, to wails of outrage, said recently that "marriage vows should be written like a dog's licence that has to be renewed every year". Katie and hubby David's union is well past its due date: "it's like one of those dogs you see in RSPCA posters Thin Pathetic. It should be put down."It doesn't help that David is "The Angriest Man in Holloway". His disdain for the modern world is inexhaustible and all-consuming. Katie has run out of excuses for continuing to live with someone who is so monstrous, even though her marriage "is a gentle, middle-class version of brutality and degradation".Miraculously, David undergoes a complete psychic transformation after meeting former ecstasy-head and faith-healer DJ GoodNews.
He gives up his bilious newspaper column and devotes himself to good causes, which include donating his children's toys to a refuge for battered wives and inviting a succession of the homeless to live with his family. "We've all been living the wrong life," he says; "we don't care enough". But David takes his charitable impulse to unintentionally comic extremes. "Fuck the homeless," says Katie, exasperated by the burden of organising an ever-expanding household.
She is not sure she likes this new David: "to dislike one husband may be regarded as unfortunate, but to dislike both looks like carelessness.""Should I stay or should I go now?" is Katie's marital dilemma as she questions her right to be happy over the needs of others. The novel charts her journey towards an uneasy resolution, while David is increasingly outcast for putting humanitarian causes before everything else. As a New Man, he is a social disaster.Hornby's prose is artful and effortless, his spiky wit as razored as a number-two cut. There are some delightful comic set-ups, and his dialogue sings with empathy for the discordant voices of ordinary, struggling humanity.
