One Day by David Nicholls – Two Characters, Twenty Years, One Day, No Ninjas

For twenty years the reader gets to see where the two main characters, Emma and Dexter, are on the 15 July, St. Swithin’s Day, hence the title of the novel One Day (2009) by David Nicholls. The story begins on their graduation from Edinburgh University in 1988 and the following night. There is a definite purpose to this particular way of dealing with the passage of time and giving the reader a compact glimpse of each year.

There is a see-sawing feeling between the two characters. When one of them is up the other one is down, when one of them is successful the other one is working just to survive. It doesn’t really apply to their happiness, because I honestly don’t know if either of them can be described as happy, rather they are comfortable or uncomfortable.

Emma is a clearly intelligent working-class girl and Dexter is well off, their families and backgrounds are different, their tastes and general outlook on life is different and their way of handling life is different. Despite all that they manage to remain friends, with some spectacular lapses when Dexter becomes too addicted to drugs and overly focused on the shallow party-life he’s leading in London as his career as a TV-presenter reaches its highpoint. While Dexter does well professionally, his personal life is more or less in shambles. Emma lives a more sedate and sensible life, first working as a server in a Tex-Mex restaurant, then as a teacher. Emma eventually achieves success as a children’s book author, while Dexter gets relegated to the churchyard of programming and eventually loses even that tenuous hold on celebrity and starts a shop selling high end food and wine.

They do eventually wind up together when Dexter’s marriage has failed and Emma has gone to Paris to live the myth of the author and write in her little garret, a cliché so trite I personally can’t see how any one could pull that off without an inward cringe, or at least a more necessary irony. Once they get together, wed and set up house I, for one, am starting to look around for the zombies. No, seriously. This is five sixths into the novel an I am starting to need zombies. Or possibly ninjas. It’s not only because I have a dark streak, but also because there is something smug about the unfolding of events. There is a big “surprise” shortly after that, a peripeteia that kind of fizzles out, irrespective of the huge, big lead-in it is given.

The problem for me is that I can see what the author is doing, trying to depict the inevitable loneliness of the human condition, the casual cruelty of fate, the way youthful aspiration most always disintegrates as we grow older and start making compromises. All the witty banter and astute observations makes this an easy read, but despite all that there is a certain lack of depth at the core of things that has little to do with the themes of the novel.

It’s a very ambitious project to undertake, telling the tale of two separate characters and their whole entire spheres in such condensed form and making it an authentic depiction of the times as well, and all that is achieved with a lightness of hand that starts looking more like sleight of hand after a while. There’s an overt cleverness to the text that has to do with its formal structure that is very seductive, but the question is ultimately always if it has any real depth, and that’s where I, as a reader, have my doubts. There is never any doubt about the writer’s technical prowess, or his intent. The question is rather to do with purpose.

I am not the target audience for this, but then there’s a lot of things I’m not the target audience for. And I’m fine with that. If I am to read five hundred pages of someone’s trivial mundane life I prefer it to have a different literary sensibility. Or possibly ninjas.

The distance the text keeps to its main characters inevitably translates into a certain distance to the reader as well. I find I don’t sympathize with either of them and that I don’t particularity care what happens to them, which, again, has to do with me not being the target audience. The basic notion that we struggle with loneliness and the occasional random cruelty of life isn’t exactly a surprise, or even something that could vaguely resemble an insight, to me personally. I’m left with little more than an occasional question mark, the odd raised eyebrow or snicker and the feeling that given time I won’t remember a single word of any of this.

Mule

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