Family fictions

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2002 by Davis, Alan

Her husband David, until he meets GoodNews, is the author of a syndicated column called "Angriest Man in Holloway," and he has driven his overworked and rather self-righteous wife, a woman who like her husband has forgotten how to have fun, into the arms of another man and to the verge of divorce. David, however, takes a love bath and becomes the most understanding father, husband, and neighbor in the world. He has his two kids give away their things to the less fortunate, moves GoodNews into the house, and holds a community meeting where he urges all and sundry to adopt a homeless person to live in the guest room. Hornby's fluency keeps the comedy moving along nicely. "This guy in Finsbury Park," as David first calls GoodNews, is not a scam artist, exactly, and not out to lunch, quite, and does good for other people, sort of, but Katie finds him, and her new infinitely unselfish mate, insufferable. Hornby fully exploits this setup in all the likely ways, and perhaps with a few twists that you won't expect. Katie cycles emotions more quickly than a Maytag before reaching her own kind of peace when she realizes, at long last, that a family is what you're stuck with. "There's nothing you can do about it," she tells her daughter. "These are the people you have to worry about first." David, who is writing a book called How to Be Good with (who else?) GoodNews, comes to sense, once his euphoria finally wears thin, that two people whose batteries have gone flat (Hornby's metaphor) can more easily splutter life back into them together than apart.

And that may be as good a place as any to bring this chronicle about fictional families to a close. Frost knew that home was the place where they had to take you in when you had to go there, which is a better way of saying that some people we can choose (or not), but family is chosen for us, and, excepting the obvious sorts of abuse and unhappiness, we walk away from that fate at our peril. Katie comes to see what many reportedly have come to see since September 11: that it's not only family that matters, but getting away from family, not by extramarital activity or globetrotting (though wayfaring in the world seriously, and not as a diversion, is no laughing matter) but by reading. "It is the act of reading itself I miss," Katie says, "the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale ... And it's not just reading, either, but listening, hearing something other than my children's TV programs and my husband's pious drone and the chatter chatter chatter in my head. What happened to me? However did I get it into my head that I was too busy for all this stuff?"

How indeed?

1 THE CORRECTIONS, by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26.00.

2 PEACE LIKE A RIVER, by Leif Enger. Atlantic Monthly Press. $24.00.

3 BLUE DIARY, by Alice Hoffman. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $24.95.

4 THE DYING ANIMAL, by Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin Company. $23.00.

5 CHOKE, by Chuck Palahniuk. Doubleday. $24.95.