One Day

When was the last time you read a book that was so good, so filling, so all consuming that you just couldn't put it down. You spent hours on end turning page after page, completely happy to spend the day wrapped up in whatever it was you were reading. For me, that book was One Day by David Nicholls. A painfully realistic, witty and sentimental novel, the characters and their lives grabbed hold of me from the very first line, and had me until the end.

The Novel, which has now become a Motion Picture (which I am both intrigued and terrified to watch, incidentally), revolves around the concept of one seemingly ordinary day - July 15th, to be exact, and visits the lives of the two main characters - Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley - on that day from 1988 and every year onward. Whether the characters are together or apart on that day, the narrative ties them together throughout the novel as the two discover what it means to grow up and remain (or fail to stay) [best] friends.

The style and voice of his writing is at once sentimental and powerfully moving (I must admit it brought me to tears on a few occasions), and wonderfully hilarious and witty – I even laughed out loud, something I RARELY do while reading. The humour: snappy, occasionally dark, and always understated was not only brilliant in its own right, but served to balance beautifully against the darker or dramatic aspects of the novel, making it a well rounded complete story.

The very style of the narrative – highlighting merely one day in a year of a life, allows for Nicholls not only to move quickly through time, but also to pull together a larger picture of actions and consequences. While we never see the ‘day after’ effect, we instead see the characters the following year, and can connect the dots as to which events we saw previously were trivial in the grand scheme of things, and which became pivotal life moments. Nicholls brilliantly handless the difficult task of keeping the reader connected and up to date with the lives of the characters without revealing too much or plunging into the boring tedium of daily life. By carefully constructing events and encounters around July 15^th he keeps the story both interesting and progressing, while firmly rooting himself in the rolls of an average and – exceptionally realistic – life.

The novel has an authentic, genuine quality to it which I personally found added immensely to the character of the novel as a whole, and thus my connection and emotional ties to the story. Set in Scotland and England primarily, with a heavy focus on Edinburgh and London, I couldn't help but love it just that little bit more, having recently visited both countries, and cities. The details in the novel such as street names, slang terms and landmarks were such that they familiarized the story to any reader with a good knowledge of the cities, but did not detract from any readers which may not. It made a nice change to read the story from view of a friend relaying a life compared to what can be described as 'informative narrative' [not sure if that's a real term or I've just made it up] which not-so-subtly explains culturally specific references to readers. 

Similarly, and more importantly, Nicholls paints his characters in sharp relief creating similarly real, relatable characters. They are, each in turn, both loveable and detestable as any human being would be. Dexter, who we might assume is a stereotype of the suave always-trying-to-be-cool guy: "He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph" is soon revealed to be so much more than just an image, with all his triumphs and failings, rounding him into a complex believable character I couldn't help but imagine as real. Emma, on the other hand, is shown first to be the anti-conformist: "The problem with these fiercely individualistic girls was that they were all exactly the same. Another book: The man who mistook his wife for a hat. Silly bloody fool, he thought, confident that it was not a mistake he would ever make." but is soon revealed with her own set of short comings and secret assets. By the end of the story their lives are told with such complex detail, in such a realistic rollercoaster of events and emotions, that I couldn't help but think for a brief moment that the author could very easily have written his life story, for all the reality it seemed to hold. Of course, neither Emma nor Dexter are modelled after David Nicholls himself, but it is a testament to his talent that it seemed (for a moment) as such.

Though I think a great deal of why I SO connected to the novel was my own personal ability to relate so strongly with the character of Emma, I found this novel both engrossing and emotionally engaging in a way which to me suggested skill beyond circumstance. Regardless of whether I saw myself in Emma, I cared immensely for both (and all) characters within the novel, where their lives would lead, if they might reconcile differences with other characters or live out their dreams. A story, put simply, about life itself, David Nicholls One Day was just that – a beautiful glimpse, once a year, into the everyday (and therefore extremely complex) lives of two common Brits. Even when things didn’t turn out as you wanted them to – a quality in plot I find most admirable in one’s writing, you pour your heart into reading it just the same, and all the more. What more could you possibly ask for?

A Vist From the Goon Squad

An interconnected tale where one character leads into the lives of another, in some small, chance way A Visit From the Goon Squad the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Jennifer Egan is a unique depiciton of multiple self destructive lives as they reflected, regret and hide from themselves. Often people find interconnceted stories a bit forced, or, for whatever reason, just simply unenjoyable, but Goon Squad had a simplicity and realistic quality to it which pulled characters together in a range of ways - from the significant to the unnoticed, in order the weave a full tapestrey of experience, leading some critics to describe it not as a Novel, but rather a Series of Short stories. (For my purposes I'm going to stick with Novel, because a that's how it read to me, and b) it was marketted/formatted as such.

Punchy and gritty, the novel is steeped in Punk and Rock and Roll - from the glamour to the depressing, dictating this in its own distinct style, both raw and refined, allowing the reader the taste of the times without diving fully into the culture of it (in say, Trainspotting style). The tone of the novel, however changes with each tale. Whether it be teen would-be punks with green hair getting wasted and tripping out at the local grunge bar, a struggling musician or the success of the CEO of a new record label, fame fortune and music preside over the story, tying them all together. With a focus on the dismantling of life over time, it follows the hopes and failures of life with a nearly objective clarity.

Because of the style of the novel - several little stories piled up into one, it is likely that the reader will find at least one which they can relate to on a deeper level, and connect their own path to. However, many of the tales are unfinished, or simply alluded to later when the name crops up in someone else's story, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks and try to connect the dots. I appreciated the fact that not all the dots are given to you. though I occasionally found it tricky, reading the name 'Drew' and thinking, where do i know that name from again? it was an interesting challenge to connect that character to the one from a previous story, and piece the aspects of a single persons life back together. I found it very life like, in that way, as discriptions and reminders were not provided (this is Sasha, she's the assistant, remember?) so that our understanding of characters was based purely on memory, and that hazy process of flipping through our personal memory name/face databases. This idea was further by the fact that the novel is not chronological, slippingfrom the late 60's to present day and back, while similarly picking and choosing between characters past, or teen years, and their adult (or even elderly) lives.

Though at first somewhat removed from the characters - perhaps the hard edged style or simply my own experiences didn't resonate with those in the novel as deeply as they might, preventing strong emotional attachment to the novel, there was still a sense of triumph in the little victories of the characters I read, and moments where I shared the empty broken feeling for girls like Jaqi who let her life slip away from them in a childish game of chasing their youth. Some of the most moving moments for me were, suprisingly, within the chapter written entirely in PowerPoint format, flowcharts and little graphs and speech bubbles rather than paragraphs. Not something I expected to enjpy 'reading', I found myself moved by the simple (and often unspoken) truths of the pages, and the underlying connection of pauses in music - a seemingly useles obsession, and yet it said it all: the unspoken parts of a song, the unsaid parts of your life. There was something beautiful in the formatting of these pages which I must admit, probablly wouldn't have carried as well in 'conventional' narrative form.

"Time's a goon, right?"
the novel is a vaguely multi-media approach to the destructive effects of time on the lives of those that most try and flee. Through each story, and each form it allows the reader to connect and observe from varying perspectives, the course of each characters life - those that succeeded or those that (more often) failed, winding up a million miles from where they started, or, more dissapointingly, in exactly the same place they started.