Recent Reading - You Are Here by David Nicholls

You Are Here is the most enjoyable of David Nicholls' books that I have read since One Day, (a book I absolutely love and hugely admire). Since reading One Day, I have also read Sweet Sorrow by the same author, which I quite liked but not enough to write anything about here (or was it laziness?) and Us, which I disliked so much that I decided not vent my spleen on the subject, as I felt it was obscurely unfair to do so.

What I found uncomfortable about Sweet Sorrow and maddening about Us was the way that Nicholls does not challenge the assumption inherent in each novel's plot line - that some people are naturally glamorous and out of reach, and those nice souls who are sparrows rather than birds of paradise ought to recognise they are too good for the likes of the glamorous and stay in their lane, worshipping from afar. Nichols doesn't seem to recognise the possibility that glamour might be worth questioning, that it might be a sign that a person has a desire to be admired and conducts themselves with that either in mind or perhaps only as a subconscious motivation. In Us, for example, the main character is so obviously worth a hundred of his wife, and yet at no point that I remember is there any faint hint that his wife is a self-satisfied idiot for despising her husband because he cannot get onboard with her appreciation of "the arts". He is supposed, apparently, to accept that the gift of appreciation she possesses sets her above him, rather than revealing her as a poseur. 

There is a touch of the same tendency in You Are Here, but it is somehow more bearable. The two main characters are slightly what the playground would term "losers", although endearing. In Nicholls-world, it is their lot to plod through life in their drab plumage and not to strive for glamour. If you accept the premise, the story is enjoyable, often amusing and from time to time touching. It certainly carries you along happily - I suppose what I am trying to say is that it is very easy to read, without ever being trashy (and in my view that is a huge achievement).

There are many amusing and touching moments in the book, and yet by the end I felt faintly melancholic. I wonder now what Nicholls's background is and whether he was brought up a Calvinist. It might explain the idea it seems to me that he always proceeds from, (whether consciously or otherwise) - the belief that individual fate is essentially preordained.