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James Kidd

David Nicholls' fourth novel, Us, arrives burdened with expectation largely thanks to One Day, his third novel.
A funny, closely observed tale of late 20th-century middle-class manners, One Day sold by the bookshop, thanks to a credible but satisfyingly on-off love story, and an unexpected and wonderfully moving conclusion.  Us is, in certain ways, One Day reduxed - not exactly "Another One Day", but One Day laid down in the cellar to age. At its heart is another finely wrought but wonky relationship - only instead of following a love story that takes ages and pages to get going, we view one from its final throes.
The result is a book that is both different and more of the same. A major contrast is in narration. Whereas One Day shuttled elegantly between the feckless Dexter and the sensible Emma,  Us  is confined to one voice. This belongs to Douglas Petersen, a 54-year-old biochemist who feels happily married to Connie, with one child, 17-year-old Albie. The premise that whets our appetite for the novel as a whole is quickly presented.
Douglas wakes in the middle of the night thinking someone has broken into his spacious house in the English countryside. Returning to bed, he hardly takes in what his wife is saying. "I didn't say anything about burglars. I said I think our marriage has run its course. Douglas, I think I want to leave you."
The line articulates a very English, indeed a very Nicholls, set-up: polite, modest and amusing on the surface, but devastating underneath. This potential is dramatised throughout the remainder of Us in the form of a travelogue. The Petersens are embarking on a Grand Tour of Europe to bid farewell to their son, who is leaving home to study photography at art school.
This journey - from France via Belgium and the Netherlands to Italy and finally to Spain - becomes a last-chance saloon for Douglas, who resolves to win Connie back and to repair his dismal relationship with Albie.
This device has a double function. The external journey provides a structure for Douglas to map his family's most interior history. But these attractive exteriors add much-needed zest to Douglas' somewhat pedestrian narration as if Nicholls, who is also a successful screenwriter, already has one eye on the inevitable movie adaptation (for what it's worth, Colin Firth must be a shoo-in for Douglas).
Douglas is the litmus test of Us. Dexter in One Day is a prize idiot, navigating the choppy waters of 1990s laddism with clumsy zest, but he's an attractive, sexy, prize idiot who male readers can admire and female readers fall in love with. Douglas is pedantic, smug, self-satisfied, boring and, most importantly, self-deluded. The very reasonableness of his tone is his, and to begin with, our undoing.
This is an odd couple indeed, meeting at the insistence of Douglas' sister, Karen, a psychedelic tearaway who believes they can be good for each other. Connie's beauty, energy and passion is supposed to pep up his lonely life of scientific research: "[Karen] liked to say that I had skipped youth and leapt straight into middle age."
The benefit to Connie is harder to define, but goes something like this: Douglas will calm her down after a failed, tempestuous relationship with an artist named Angelo.
The narrative of their marriage works to a noticeably One Day blueprint. Nicholls performs a sort of sit-down prose comedy, offering telling reflections on everything from weddings to dinner parties, and house decoration to first dates. It is amusing but not wildly so, and is seasoned from the start with tart pinches of emotional pain: the marriage is rocked first by infidelity, and later by the loss of a daughter, both of which Nicholls narrates with an affecting directness.
One Day turned Nicholls into something of a spokesman for sensitive, flawed men everywhere. Douglas will both exacerbate and challenge this role. He is the sort of man who declares himself hopelessly in love on almost every page: "The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did."
These private confessions suggest both his genuine humility and less stable undercurrents that his monologue slowly brings to the surface: self-pity, emotional reticence and a lack of self-knowledge.
Nicholls exploits the first-person narrative's inherent restrictions to good effect. Douglas, we realise, indulges in a lot of saying and not much doing. It is a very English habit for fathers to declare their pride in their spouses and children, only to vanish to the office, the pub or the golf course when they are really needed. To start with, Douglas' very reasonableness blinds us to the fact that he could have done anything wrong. Connie's request for a separation is, it would seem, a result of her uncurbed wildness. The conflict between Douglas and Albie seems to stem from teenage angst, hormones and maternal spoiling.
It takes a while for the cracks to show. Douglas' jealousy of the erratic but erotic Angelo produces fissures, but it is Albie who smashes them open. Having provoked his father with a series of relatively innocent indiscretions, Albie is the catalyst for a family crisis when he gets into a - slightly incredible - fight with an American arms dealer in Amsterdam. Douglas interposes, not to rescue his son, but to apologise for him. A humiliated Albie goes one way, his parents another - seemingly on separate paths.

	Us is a fine book, just one that is easier to admire than to love
Douglas remains in Europe to track Albie down and, so he hopes, win back Connie's heart. In Venice, he flirts cautiously with a Danish dentist: "You are an extremely interesting, intelligent and compassionate woman, with superb vocabulary." Then he gets himself arrested assisting Albie's ex-girlfriend, an Australian accordion-playing busker named Cat.
This spot of derring-do is possibly what Douglas has craved all along. References to Jason Bourne hint at his need for heroism, after a very English fashion. Douglas had hoped that providing a comfortable life was heroic enough, and is taken aback when the rest of the family fail to agree. By the time they are arranging that Grand Tour, Douglas' defensive resentfulness makes Connie's decision to leave all the more understandable.
Douglas' redemption comes from acknowledging this fact and is ultimately a recognition of the narrowness of Nicholls' novel. He finally realises that "us" is a plural pronoun and must incorporate "alternative points of view". He suddenly sees that Albie could have produced his own coming-of-age narrative: his son is "a little pretentious and irresponsible", but also "charismatic, complex and unconventional".
Connie, by a similar token, might have written a high-brow romance - "beautiful, witty, a little insecure" she finds love but not peace of mind with Douglas, and in middle age is filled with unfulfilled longings.
It is an intriguing way to express a moment of clarity, and promotes the novel's strengths and weaknesses. Nicholls has given these established genres a twist by narrating from Douglas' perspective, a 21st-century Charles Pooter, someone likeable, but bland, careful and rather pedantic. And yet deft as Us is, one can't help but feel it might have been a more fun experience if narrated by Albie or Connie. That Nicholls wrings the emotion out of such everyday imponderables as the sex lives of fruit flies or the sweat properties of corduroy suits owes much to his unassuming way with plotting and character.
More baldly, he pushes the buttons of his middle-class readership worried about property, children, health, schooling and that old devil, the work-life balance.
Us will be praised for tackling more mature issues than One Day, but its muted seriousness does pose a problem where sheer enjoyment is concerned. Douglas lacks the overt charm, sparkle and the humour that made his predecessors such a critical and commercial delight. Ironically, the story is possibly a victim of Nicholls' success in portraying a mundane English anti-hero. One admires Douglas in much the same way that one admires a snail making its way up a garden path. There is something strangely compelling about its slowness, but one wishes at times that he would at least jump about a bit.
Of course, it is all too easy to confuse the intentional shortcomings of a character with the flaws of a work of art. Yet Douglas' gentle candour acts like a kindly magnifying glass highlighting his family's smallest flaws at the expense of sympathy. Such honesty may be Us' raison d'etre, but by the time the book ends on a note of hard-won sentiment, I wasn't particularly invested in what happened to any of them.
Us is a fine book, just one that is easier to admire than to love.
thereview@scmp.com
 


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Book review: Us, by David Nicholls

Illustration: Sarene Chan

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Culture

Books

Narrator exposes whole cloth of self delusion as family ties unravel in David Nicholls' latest novel


Narrator exposes whole cloth of self delusion as family ties unravel in David Nicholls' latest novel, writes James Kidd.
