"Twenty years; two people," the front cover says it all. David Nicholls'
One Day is the story of two people who hook up after graduating from the University of Edinburgh and follows their friendship and occasional romantic encounters through a recounting of the July 15th of each of the next 20 years.
I'm not going to lie: this wasn't a book that I would have picked out myself. A dear friend picked it out as the first installment of our newly founded book club, which is awesomely named, "Lalonda."
One Day, which has since been made into an August movie, took me a while to get into, but once I fell, I fell hard. I couldn't put it down and definitely cried 10-ish tears during the last ten percent of the book (I read it on the Kindle so it goes by percents, not page numbers).
At the beginning of the book I was put off by how clearly the author and the characters put each other in categories: Emma and Nicholls put Dexter in the pretty boy, playboy category. Nicholls and Dexter, in turn, put Emma in the sort-of-smart, wanna-be full of original, independent political opinions category. Both of these categories are cliches. Of course, cliches are cliches for a reason, right? There's something in them that resonates. Plus, in the course of the novel, the characters are fleshed out a bit (to use a cliche).
Hmm...I was a little annoyed with the letters that Dexter and Emma send back and forth in the course of the book. They aren't very letter-like letters, I don't think. They're more like gchats or a casual phone call in letter form. I think it's pretty hard to use letters in fiction: it's hard to pull off that they're written by two different people to each other, and not just by one person. I actually can't think of fiction that includes persuasive correspondence. Any nominations for excellently executed fictional letters, dear readers?
I disagree with what I perceived to be one theme of the novel: that of women improving men. Emma is an admirable character; she improves her boyfriends. I think that the book swoops dangerously closely to idolizing women in their male-improving capacities. I don't think that women improve men; I think that men and women can help each other improve in the context of relationships.
I should say a word about the theme of friendship between a man and a
woman in the novel. Emma and Dexter briefly hook up, then maintain a
friendship over a number of years, punctuated by occasional fights and
romantic rekindling. Clearly they are friends or they wouldn't still
spend time together when they're seeing other people. Clearly, though,
their romantic attraction, waxing and waning, is in the background the
whole time. It seems that friendship is their back-up plan since their romantic timing is off. This book could be one giant (I think it's more than 400 pages,
but I forget, since I read it on a Kindle) argument for people who say
that men and women can't be friends when they aren't married to each
other. But their friendship is a pretty objectively good thing, even apart from their romance.
For some reason,
One Day reminds me of a book that our Mama Leopard bought us years ago that became Leopard legend,
The Inklings.
The Inklings is a novel of a girl who, as best I remember, spends a semester or year abroad from UVA at Oxford. She falls for two men--a rich minor nobility of her own age, who is, of course, slightly degenerate. And second, her poor, smart tutor. Guess which one she chooses? (Incidentally, the most legendary part of this legendary book is the repeated description of the minor nobility helping her on with her coat and sensually [or as sensually as a Christian romantic fiction can summon up, which is, for the record, a whole lot!] lifts her hair out of her coat for her. That scene is repeated so many times in the novel as to become comic.)
One Day reminds me of
The Inklings for this reason: In one of his essays, C.S. Lewis describes the practice of imagination as "castle-building." He says that people who practice mental castle-building might be cut out to be writers. People who are always the star of their own story, however, are not. This makes me think I'm not, because, while like Anne of Green Gables, who was dreaming of rescuing her friend from a fever and left the cheese-cloth off of the pudding, which allowed a mouse to climb in and drown, I have an active imagination, my imagined stories are mostly about me (Or possibly it's the length of this run-on sentence that would prevent me from being a writer...). Both
The Inklings and
One Day strike me as being particular fantasies of the authors--imaginations that are really all about themselves. The author of
The Inklings, as far as I remember, was a mother of nine who was homeschooling them. It seems that
The Inklings was what she wished had happened to her. It seems to me that David Nicholls may also just be writing out his own fantasy, although I have the feeling that he's the girl, Emma, rather than the boy in this novel (it seems he's done a little theater, like Emma, and has written some screen plays, which as far as I remember, she tried to do, and then some novels, as she finally does).
Not to make this far too drawn out, but I went to see some improv while I was reading the part of the novel where Emma was dating a (not very funny) stand-up comedian. Well, real life meets fiction, because none of the improv comedians were very funny at all. I mean, seriously, I was barely even tempted to smile, not to mention laugh. It all made me feel like I was simply an uptight person. The first comedian reminded me a lot of Ian, the boy Emma dates. He seemed to be not very comfortable with himself. And it seemed like all of the things that he was saying, he'd already said many times before. The whole improv thing did get very funny, though, when they started riffing off the graduate student we were celebrating. Graduate students must be the easiest thing in the world to make fun of. They were asking our friend about her life and one of our colleagues shouted out, "When are you going to be done with your dissertation?" Oh my, just the humor that I need at this bleak spot in my life.
The Kindle: This is my first time using one for a sustained length of time. I'm glad it has the percentage of the book read at the bottom. I am obsessed with knowing how far along I am when I'm reading. I don't think that the face of it holds very much text--I find myself turning a lot of pages, more, I think, than a book, which makes it mildly more annoying if you need to go back and reread something. But I'm still getting used to navigating it. In its defense, it's very light, so pretty good for reading in bed (I always get tired arms from big, heavy book reading in bed). And it's easy to read. I can't imagine reading everything on it forever, though--it had no variation, which is to say any book would come to it in the same font size and font type as every other book. Any personality or character of the book will be lost. But that's all Francisco's critique; I'm just stealing it.
Well, to be perfectly honest, I can't get the buttons. There are two large buttons, one on each side of the rectangle. Both mean that you're turning the page forward. Now that is very convenient, because mostly when you're reading, you need to turn the page forward. It's convenient because you can hold the Kindle in either hand and turn the pages forward. But I just can't get it: in real life, one side of an open book let's you turn the page forward; the other side of the book lets you turn the page backward. Now on this rectangle, both big buttons mean forward; both small ones above the big ones mean backward.
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