As might be guessed, the instructional tone of High Fidelity author Nick Hornby's new novel's title turns out to be something of a joke. As a rough description of its subject matter, however, it's not far off the mark. Taking a break from charting the psyches of pop-culture-suffocated men, Hornby fills his latest book with characters attempting to set their moral compasses to a lost true north. Hornby's narrator Katie, a doctor and mother of two with little time for culture (pop or otherwise), kicks off the soul-searching by requesting a divorce via cell phone in the midst of a weekend-long tryst with a new lover. Katie assures readers, by way of assuring herself, that she's not a bad person, and Hornby makes the sources of her frustration clear while using them as a point of departure for a personal quest. Forces seem to conspire against Katie's happiness. Married to David, an unloving, prematurely cranky writer whose steadiest source of income comes from penning a column called "The Angriest Man In Holloway," she takes little pleasure in her home or her job, where her ability to work toward the general good is continually frustrated by the National Health Service. Even her proposed divorce doesn't go as planned: David, having undergone a spiritual conversion, brings home a miraculous, heavily pierced healer named DJ GoodNews, and starts giving away his family's possessions and asking neighbors with spare rooms to take in homeless teens. After all, isn't that what any good person would do? What threatens from the start to become a routine account of domestic disintegration then veers sharply toward gimmickry, but to Hornby's credit, he mostly steers clear of both extremes, concentrating instead on the serious issues at hand. His just-telling-a-friend-a-story approach occasionally gets the better of How To Be Good's momentum, but the same easy, humorous storytelling lends his observations marksman-like accuracy. Of her husband and his friend's attempts to improve the world, for instance, Katie remarks, "I wish David and GoodNews were interested in starting up an Internet company so that they could make millions of pounds to spend on Page Three girls and swimming pools and cocaine and designer suits. People would understand that. That wouldn't upset the neighbors." Hornby explores these gaps between the principles people profess and the principles by which they live, and comes up with no easy answers to the contradictions. David's newfound virtue, after all, proves every bit as threatening to his family as Katie's newfound vice. The novel's loose, episodic, occasionally ambling nature suggests that Hornby feels as indicted and confused by this sort of contradiction as his characters do, but in the end, How To Be Good is aided by the depth of his involvement. In the author's world, the only way out of a moral quagmire, whether personal or social, is effort.