One Day by David Nicholls
You’ve seen it in the hands of commuters and all over the shelves of WH Smiths and Tesco; you’ve heard that the film is coming out this summer starring Anne Hathaway (Heaven forbid) and Jim Sturgess; and, unless you’ve read it yourself, you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about. Well, make haste; get yourself down to those Tescos shelves, befriend a commuter – however you do it, get your hands on a copy and only then will you truly understand why One Day is such a wonderful book.
The opening concept is admittedly nothing out of the ordinary: two students at Edinburgh University have a post-finals fling, wake up together, bleary-eyed and boozey, engage in some semi-awkward pillow-talk and, after spending the day together, go their separate ways. It is 15th July 1988, St Swithin's Day, a date charged with significance and to which the title alludes. One Day revisits Emma and Dexter on this day, every year for the next two decades. It traces their increasingly divergent lives, occasionally in parallel but frequently perforated by intense instants of crossover. It dawns on them, as it does us, that they are happiest when they are together; nay, they are in love. Yet they remain just friends, albeit ‘best’ friends in some ways. David Nicholls succeeds in encapsulating the quintessence of young adulthood, first love and heartbreak whilst spinning a tangled web of a platonic friendship that continually teeters towards romance.
Working-class northerner Emma moves to London and becomes a waitress in a bad Mexican restaurant, whilst secretly nurturing a desire to become a writer. Yet she ends up teaching English and moving in with her bland boyfriend, Ian, a failing stand-up comedian, whose choicer puns include pasta ‘penne for your thoughts’. Emma is immediately likeable, in spite of her flaws: ‘self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most’.
Middle-class Dexter, on the other hand, does not lack self-confidence. After a couple of gap years, he pursues an initially successful career as a laddish television presenter and becomes addicted to sex (his girlfriends are ‘like funfair goldfish; no point giving them names, they never last that long’), drugs and his own pathetic C-list celebrity. Although it seems at first, blinkered, glance that he has it all, he becomes increasingly hedonistic, ostracising Emma so entirely that we feel that the emerging chasm between them may never close: ‘Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead?’
Cynics are quick to point out the ‘limiting’ structure of the novel, arguing that returning to the same day each year means that some of the most important events in their life are never recounted. But would you really want to read every intricate detail of these two characters’ lives for twenty years? Doubtful. And it is precisely because the novel spans for such a vast amount of time that it is so affecting: you really do put down the book with the irrational feeling that Em and Dex are as well known to you as your closest friends. Besides, not only can we use our own capable imaginations to fill in these gaps, but also the event that is the ‘most important’ in this book is arguably the relationship between Emma and Dexter in its twenty-year entirety, and this is certainly recounted.For all its comic gloss, One Day personifies the gritty reality of loneliness and unmasks the savagery of fate; the tragic abyss between youthful ambition and the compromises that we come to endure. Yet despite Nicholls’ refusal to provide easy consolations – at points this book is unbearably sad – his witty prose is uplifting and resonates above the desolation. This is Nicholls at his best; a warm-hearted, engaging and totally brilliant book that you will fall in love with.
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