ABSTRACT
Nick Hornby was born in 1957 into a family several rungs further up the subtly graded ladder of the English class system than one might suspect from a casual reading of his books. No writer in the 1990s was as adept and as funny as Nick Hornby in portraying the emotional confusions and immaturities of white, middle-class urban man. Hornby was one of the first middle-class fans to own up to his love of football. To claim Hornby is bland because he writes about 'what actually happened' is unfair and yet there is a sense throughout About a Boy that he is treading ground he has covered before—and better. Like all of Hornby's writing, "How to Be Good" is funny, rooted in topicality and the particular, yet it does show the ways in which big ideas have a part to play in small lives. It shows that Hornby's preferred 'domestic' fiction need not be incapable of accommodating major themes.
