Review by New York Times Review
DAVID NICHOLLS'S "US," which had yet to be published when it was selected for the longlist of the Man Booker prize last summer, was widely regarded as the judges' nod to popular taste, a kind of token cute blonde candidate for an award often criticized as quirky and elitist. Nicholls's previous novel was the best-selling "One Day," which served as the basis for a movie starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess. Like its predecessor, this new offering charts the path of an unlikely love affair over the course of decades. Shortly before they are to embark on a summer trip to Europe, Douglas Petersen's wife announces that she may be on the verge of leaving him. Douglas has imagined the trip he so meticulously planned as a kind of accelerated, low-budget version of the Grand Tour, a chance to see the great monuments and museums of Europe with his family before his son leaves the nest for art school - an opportunity for bonding and education. Douglas is not the kind of guy who would undertake a trip to the Continent for its own sake. A 54-year-old biochemist of stolid disposition, he's a reader of instruction manuals, a balancer of checkbooks, a maker of lists. He's as British as Marmite, and I suspect his attractiveness to readers will be as polarized as reaction to that yeasty condiment. Making a to-do list for the trip, Douglas dutifully advises himself to "maintain a sense of fun and spontaneity." Temperamentally, he's the polar opposite of Dexter Mayhew, the handsome, feckless protagonist of "One Day." Like "One Day," "Us" is the story of an odd couple, and here it's Connie, the girlfriend/wife, who's the wild, spontaneous, unconventional half of the sketch. When the couple meet, Connie is an aspiring painter with an interest in recreational drugs, though she eventually settles into marriage and motherhood. The novel is made up of two parallel narratives, chapters recounting Connie and Douglas's courtship and eventual marriage alternating with chapters relating the family's paint-by-numbers progress through Europe. On the train to France, Douglas tells us, "I handed out A4 polypropylene wallets containing itineraries for the North European leg of our trip; hotel addresses, phone numbers and train times; and a loose breakdown of events and activities." The Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and the Jardin du Luxembourg are dutifully ticked off, although Douglas's son, Albie, a rebellious 17-year-old who's openly hostile to the whole enterprise, does his best to sabotage the schedule. Eventually, in Amsterdam, following the planned visit to the Rijksmuseum, Albie jumps ship after his father humiliates him, disappearing into the streets with an accordion-playing busker from New Zealand. Connie soon returns to England, while Douglas sticks to the itinerary, hoping the promise of prepaid hotel rooms will eventually entice his son to return to the program. The two strands of narrative both address the same question in slightly different form: Why does Connie want to leave Douglas, and why the hell did she marry him in the first place? Curiously, though Douglas holds all the cards as the first-person narrator, he's so self-deprecating that we can't help sympathizing with his wife and son. Nicholls wrings a certain amount of comedy out of Douglas's hopeless squareness. "My wardrobe at that time ran the gamut from taupe to gray," he tells us of the night he first met Connie, "all the colors of the lichen world, and it's a safe bet that chinos were involved." Douglas's plodding empiricism and his self-professed inability to appreciate art or literature result in some humorous passages, as in the chapter in which he recounts the history of art, as he sees it: "Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. ... Some bright spark realized that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was very good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail." At times, though, Nicholls seems to be scoring easy points off his nerdy protagonist. "It's the idea of you and me in each other's pockets forever more. It's like ... a Beckett play," Connie says early on, trying to explain why she wants to leave him. "I'd not seen a Beckett play," Douglas remarks, "but presumed this was a bad thing." Over the course of the novel, Douglas's constant protestations of his own colorlessness grow tedious. And in choosing such a repressed and decorous narrator, Nicholls glosses over the darker and more turbulent emotions with the verbal equivalent of a stiff upper lip. "I am not an especially passionate man," Douglas confides, about halfway through the book, by which time the description is unnecessary. His treatment of the death of the couple's infant daughter consists largely of trying to gauge, and ameliorate, his wife's reaction rather than plumb his own feelings. And the couple's sex life is similarly passed over: "Scientific terms, though clinically accurate, don't really convey the heady dark intensity etc., etc. and I'd like to avoid simile and metaphor - valley, orchid, garden, that kind of thing. Certainly I have no intention of using a whole load of swear words. So I won't go into detail, except to say that it worked out pretty well for all concerned." This sort of diffidence might be admirable in a neighbor or an acquaintance, but in the narrator of a book about marriage it seems more like laziness - or self-censorship. "I am not a natural raconteur," Douglas tells us, which tends to raise the question - then why are you telling us this very long story? THERE IS NO question that Douglas Petersen would make an excellent house sitter or executor of your will, and you might very well want your daughter to marry him. Whether your daughter would want to marry him is surely another story, as is the matter of whether you'd nominate good old reliable Douglas to be the narrator of a 400-page novel. Imagine Mr. Collins as the narrator of "Pride and Prejudice" or Charles Bovary telling his wife's story. (Like Emma Bovary, Connie Petersen has an affair early in her marriage, another fact Douglas doesn't wish to dwell upon.) Nicholls is a deft craftsman, a skilled storyteller and a keen observer of contemporary mores. It would be interesting to see him challenge himself to dig deeper under the surface of contemporary life. "Us" will probably be welcomed by his legions of fans, though it's unlikely to surprise or challenge or unsettle them in any way - or to provoke them to look at each other with a wild surmise. JAY McINERNEY'S most recent book is "How It Ended: New and Collected Stories."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 25, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Nicholls brings his trademark wit and wisdom to this by turns hilarious and heartbreaking examination of a long-term marriage. Biochemist Douglas Petersen is about to embark on a grand tour of Europe with his artistic wife of 25 years, Connie, and his temperamental 17-year-old son, Albie, who is about to leave for college. But on the eve of their departure, his wife tells him that, after the trip, she wants a divorce. A shocked Douglas hatches a scheme to win back his wife and repair his fractious relationship with his son. Traveling from the museums of Paris and Amsterdam to the beaches of Spain, the Petersen family struggle to regain their equilibrium, but Douglas' determination to have fun, complete with an ironclad itinerary, leads to spectacular fights, hurt feelings, and simmering tensions, all of which are conveyed by Nicholls with both humor and a deep compassion for human frailty. As Douglas looks back in longing on the couple's first heady days of love and courtship, he struggles to maintain his touching optimism for the future of their marriage. This tender novel will further cement Nicholls' reputation as a master of romantic comedy. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Nicholls' 2010 novel, One Day, has sold more than two million copies in 37 languages, and his latest will receive BEA and book-club promotion as well as a 500,000-copy first printing.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Nicholls's (One Day) latest novel, Connie Peterson wakes her husband Douglas in the middle of the night to tell him she may want to end their marriage. The family already has a European trip planned, the last before their son, Albie, leaves their London suburb for college, and Douglas, ever the scientist, hatches a plan to change Connie's mind: he will ensure their trip becomes an exemplar of the happy family they can be. Working against Douglas is the fact that he and his son have suffered a strained relationship from birth, and that Connie, an artist at heart, believes an organic vacation-one that evolves from the whims of any given day-would be a great improvement over Douglas's strict, pedantic itineraries. Douglas is an amiably bumbling narrator, and Nicholls convincingly infuses his protagonist's voice with the dry wit and charm that have served the author so well in his previous books. This is Nicholls's most ambitious work to date, and his realistically flawed characters are somehow endearing despite the many bruises they inflict upon each other. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Douglas Petersen is a biochemist. His wife, Connie, an artist (though nonpracticing) and arts administrator, in bed at 4 a.m., tells him that after 24 years of marriage she is thinking of leaving him. The often maddeningly practical, reliable, and methodical Douglas is, understandably, shaken, as his devotion to Connie is beyond question. The family was to embark on a Grand Tour of Europe this summer; their 17-year-old son, Albie, is starting college in the fall. Connie feels they should all go anyway. Douglas, ever the scientist, hopes that through careful preparation (and lots of Wikipedia) the trip will bring structure to his son and help remind his wife of the wonderful life they share. Yet an altercation with a guest in their Amsterdam hotel sends Albie off on his own, with Douglas in hot pursuit. VERDICT Nicholls (One Day) has created in Douglas a man who has always known where he was and where he was going and who now is suddenly adrift emotionally as well as physically. And all the guidebooks and online tours won't be enough to right his course. Are you thinking this is a predictable tale of family dynamics? Think again; this is Nicholls, after all. For those who loved One Day, the author's latest is another heart-grabber about discovering what makes us happy and learning to let go. [See Prepub Alert, 5/12/14; see also "Editors' Fall Picks," LJ 9/1/14, p. 28.]-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In his picaresque fourth novel, Nicholls (One Day, 2010, etc.) artfully unveils 25 years of a couple's relationship. Shortly before Douglas Petersen, his wife, Connie, and their 17-year-old son, Albie, are to take a "Grand Tour" of Europe, Connie makes a surprising announcement: She thinks their marriage "has run its course" and is thinking about leaving. Connie is panicked at the thought of Albie going to college at the end of summer, leaving her and Douglas alone in the house. Douglas, a straight-laced biochemist who "had skipped youth and leapt into middle age," came along at a time when Connie, artistic and free-spirited but directionless, needed someone sensible. Despite the announcement, Connie still wants to take this holiday together, and as their journey begins, so does Douglas' examination of his marriage. Part travelogue, part personal history, Douglas' first-person narration intersperses humorous observations of their travels, during which Douglas usually finds himself out of step with his art-loving wife and son, with his wistful recounting of their back story, from his unlikely courtship to his recent positioning as a misfit in his family of three. After a ruinous morning in Amsterdam, when Albie unwisely confronts a trio of arms dealers and Douglas intervenes in a way that infuriates his family, Albie runs away, and the "Grand Tour," deemed a failure, comes to an end. Yet before it's too late, Douglas seizes a chance to find his son, win back the affections of his wife, and make this journey, both literal and figurative, a heroic one after all. Nicholls is a master of the braided narrative, weaving the past and present to create an intricate whole, one that is at times deceptively light and unexpectedly devastating. Though the narration is self-conscious at first, it gradually settles into a voice that is wistful, wry, bewildered and incisive, drawing a portrait of a man who has been out of his league for a long time. Evocative of its European localesLondon, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, Madridand awkward family vacations everywhere, this is a funny and moving novel perfect for a long journey. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
