I love the style of One Day.
The content is my kind of subject matter but what I really love is the prose style of David Nicholls.
In a reading-aloud age, a podcast age, an audiobook age, prose needs to flow like talk and sound like speech on the page, needs to ramble and improvise and interrupt itself and circle back on its themes and jokes and leitmotifs.
It needs to dance sweetly but build cumulatively.
I think of this book as post-Nick Hornby, post-Richard Curtis, maybe a bit like an anglicised Jay McInerney.
Nicholls makes it seem easy to write a modern comic story in fast-moving prose.
The other thing is that he likes all his characters. There’s a lot of love here, a ton of forgiveness.
I’m a subscriber to Book Slam’s monthly email and that was how I first heard about David Nicholls. I always do some homework on the writers and performers I’m going to see and when I Googled Nicholls I found that his new novel was the No.9 best-selling book on Amazon UK.
Not the No.9 novel but the No.9 book of any kind !!!!!
I thought : Christ, this guy is huge and I’ve never heard of him !
At Book Slam, Nichols told us that he’d been an unsuccessful actor for eight or nine years before getting involved in screenwriting.
I’ve seen charismatic performers like Will Self and Hanif Kureishi at Book Slam, and also many other good novelists and poets, including the marvellous Will Boyd, but David Nicholls’s reading was the best I’ve heard and that performance is featured on one of their 19th podcast as bookslam19, which is also available through iTunes .
Jan also read the book but she didn’t like it as much as I did.
One afternoon when we were coming out of The Royal Academy she asked I wanted to go to Waterstones and I did. But it was raining, so we ran across the road to Hatchard’s instead, and as we browsed the shelves we floated to different parts of the big shop, as you do.
I asked a young sales assistant whether David Nicholls had been in to do a signing session and he had.
Then the girl surprised me.
“I’m reading One Day at the moment,” she said.
“I loved it, I think it’s the funniest novel written by an Englishman in thirty years.”
Then Jan joined us
“This is my wife, she thought it was a bit cliched.”
The girl smiled and spoke to Jan.
“I can see why you’d think it’s cliched.”
So there you have it. Men and women like different books because men and women are made in a different way and view life in a different way. Not many books will appeal equally to girls and blokes.
For me, Nicholls creates marvellous female characters like Emma Morley, who becomes a teacher and shags the head on the floor of his office, and then they have a disastrous holiday in Corfu :
“I think we want different things’ was the best that she could come up with, and the rest the long, long fortnight passed in a haze of sunburn and sulking, self-pity and anxiety about whether the jewellers would take the ring back. Nothing in the world could be more melancholy than that unwanted engagement ring. It sat in the suitcase in their hotel room, emanating sadness like radiation.
She returned from the holiday looking brown and unhappy. Her mother, who knew about the proposal, who had practically bought her own dress for their wedding, raged and moaned at Emma for weeks until she began to question her rejection of the offer. But saying yes would feel like caving in, and Emma knew from novels that you should never cave in to marriage.
Harry Ritchie reviewed the book for The Observer :
Among many other things, One Day is a very persuasive and endearing account of a close friendship – the delight Emma and Dexter take in one another, the flirting and the banter that sometimes hide resentment and sometimes yearning, the way the relationship shifts and evolves as the years pass……..
Just as Nichols has made full use of his central concept, so he has drawn on all his comic and literary gifts to produce a novel that is not only roaring funny but also memorable, moving and, in its own unassuming, unpretentious way, rather profound.
Exactly, Harry.