#327: Book Review — One Day — David Nicholls
This is a story about flaws.
The only reason I read this book is because we found a flawed copy at the bookshop. My delightful boss noticed we had one copy without a title. Some kind of printing error, we guessed. Imagine the above picture, without any blue on it. Just the orange silhouettes. I think it looks better.
I read it quickly, which is significant because usually I’m incapable of reading anything quickly. I fell into this book, falling fifty pages before I even glanced up, the way I used to read before years of English Literature swallowed up my ability to relax into a book.
I could still feel the impulse, niggling at me to stop and
CRITICIZE THE TEXT
the way I’ve been hardwired to do. But I didn’t want to.
You are thrown into the lives of Dexter and Emma as they nearly sleep together on the night of their university graduation, in nineteen-ninety-something. Cue witty banter and a little insight into what they’re feeling (Dexter horny, Emma insecure). Neither of these characters prompted any love at first sight from me.
Then come the post-uni years, and there it is, the lives of me and my friends splashed out across the page. The opportunities, the uncertainties, the crushing pressure to do something with the glorious gift of life, before you become old and gnarled and a closet Tory.
And loath as I am to admit it, it did feel very #relatable. I’m particularly loath to admit any similarities between myself and Dexter, an overconfident posh-boy from the south who gallivants around the globe doing bullshit “teaching” jobs for a few years after graduation. Fortunately he sleeps with loads of girls, so the similarities at least end somewhere.
Emma is a much more sympathetic character. It’s hammered home that she’s the more intelligent of the pair, witty and principled, full of revolutionary notions. There’s a fantastic line in the first chapter where Dexter realises that everything in Emma’s room is there to say something — the Che Guevara posters, the actresses, the quotes — they’re all placed with an agenda, all designed to be seen by someone other than her. This was not just a hit home for me, more of a home run. I designed my Uni bedroom with a shameful level of meticulousness.
But suddenly here we hit upon
A FLAW
which is that Emma is a bit brilliant at everything. Beautiful and intelligent and kind and humble, she is every girl David Nicholls has ever thought he met while drunkenly projecting his ideal personality traits onto a flawed woman. I’m conscious this sounds very like the Mary-Sue argument made by Star-Wars neckbeard types, but characters should not be perfect if you want me to like them. Except for Snape.
Dexter, however, has many, many flaws, delved into with great depth and, it has to be said, a great deal more interest by the author. He’s obviously some kind of aggrandized version of Nicholls, a cross between who he wishes he was now and who his 25 year old self wishes he was. Dex is dim-witted and vain, sex-obsessed and shallow, but oh-so-fucking loveable. And to be fair, I liked him.
His saving trait is, of course, Emma. And I guess that in itself is a
FLAW
because it makes me wonder whether Emma’s purpose is to complete Dexter? I’m sure you could argue they complete each other, they’re designed to be complementary, but I would bet my bottom dollar (if I was in a saloon at the time) that Dexter was the first character on Nicholls’ blank page, not Emma. Emma is a girl imagined by a boy. Emma is film-Hermione, rather than book-Hermione. Her main flaw in the first half of the book is that she doesn’t succeed in getting a job, for a reason never made explicable. She works for a shit Mexican restaurant for three years, but why? So that she can be compared with Dexter, living it up with a flashy new TV job.
Dex’s foray into youth TV is convincing, and it’s loveable because it’s so bloody 90s. But as Nicholls takes his chisel and carves DEXTER HAS A BETTER LIFE THAN EMMA into your skull, you know where this is going. Which leads to the main
FLAW,
the central one in the middle of the
FLAW
nexus: that this book is predictable.
You know Dexter will fuck something up, that life is coming for him, and you know Emma will reverse her fortunes, a good hundred pages before it comes to pass. And when they get into other relationships, you know it’s all going to go wrong. And when they get together happily ever after, but you realise there’s still a hefty chunk of pages beneath your right thumb, you know there’s a final twist on its way.
But my central premise is
IT DOESN’T FUCKING MATTER
This book is a cheesy rom-com. Its characters are overblown stereotypes. Their actions are a bit too relatable to be the actions of individual people. Sometimes it seems like they are the mathematical mean of people: take what every thirty-year-old woman is doing, divide by the number of thirty-year-old women, and you have Emma in Chapter 11. The book also won’t be getting applause from Butler and De Beauvoir any time soon. And yes, yes, ok grandma, I get it, the book is predictable.
But it’s just so fucking lovely.
The idea of a lifelong friendship that isn’t two mates getting on fine, but a turbulent, troublesome attraction which goes beyond current state of affairs, or what country they’re in, or what their job is, is so bloody appealing to me that I can’t hate it. I hate bad romcoms and I love good ones, and I loved this. I would look forward to my lunch breaks at work so I could step through this portal of pages and find out what stupid, ridiculous hijinks Dexter is up to, whether Emma’s finally broken out of that cringeworthy relationship or not. A love that sticks to the airing-cupboard of your psyche for years despite lack of contact or nourishment is a true love, and I bought this one. And most importantly: it’s funny. I haven’t laughed this much at a book in years. Why not? When did I stop laughing at books? It was like I was taught to remember how.
And maybe this means my twelve years of education in English Literature has failed me, but I mean, christ, I work in a bookshop, that much was clear from the first paragraph.
