David Nicholls’s Us, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014, is the story of a family showing signs of utmost strain while its members take turns at dwelling on the fringes of either intimacy or separation throughout the novel, writes ANKITA ARORA
Us
Author: David Nicholls
Publisher: Hachette, Rs599
Ahome is a place of residence which is shaped to the comfort of those who inhabit its architecture and conceive stories in and around it. It is called home when it holds a family together and simply a house if the family reaches its inevitable separation. David Nicholls’s Us, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014, is the story of a family showing signs of the utmost strain while its members take turns at dwelling on the fringes of either intimacy or separation throughout the course of the novel.
Douglas Timothy Petersen, a 54-year old unimaginative industrial biochemist, is thrown into crisis by his polar opposite spontaneous wife in the opening pages of the novel. Connie announces in the middle of the night, “I think our marriage has run its course. Douglas, I think I want to leave you.” In order to make her feelings clearer, Connie cites literary references underlining Nicholls’s ability to showcase wit through subtle humour at the same time. Connie declares, “It’s the idea of you and me in each other’s pockets forever more. It’s like ... a Beckett’s play.” To this, Douglas remarks, “I’d not seen a Beckett play, but presumed this was a bad thing.”
Us is an attempt at finding an answer to the question, why does Connie want to leave Douglas when she keeps on voicing her love for him repeatedlyIJ She has been thinking of this marriage as a task which was completed perfectly after having shared their lives for a little over 25 years. Now that their “work” of raising a child together is done, Connie’s need to move on, “rediscover herself”, and paint again, throws Douglas in a position from where he can see the urgent need to knit together the incomprehensible damage which the passage of time does to marriage.
The couple decide to spend one last summer on a modern-day train-based version of the classical European Grand Tour with their 17-year old son Albie. This would be the last fling for the family as a nuclear unit before everyone but Douglas starts to spread out. All of this gets further complicated as Douglas enters a futile territory called nostalgia throughout the Grand Tour in order to understand what went wrong in his relationship with Connie. He further comes across as a misfit in his own family. Nevertheless, when the Tour inevitably descends into disaster after Albie abandons his father’s carefully constructed itineraries, Douglas firmly decides to “not lose [his] wife and son” and that the dismantling of his home “could not be allowed to happen.” He takes it upon himself and does everything he could to repair his relationship with both his wife and his son. It even takes an ataque al corazon for him to get a step closer to the both of them. Connie confesses, “let’s do exactly the same holiday next year”.
Us is full of flashbacks which blend the past with the present in a beautiful rhythmic pattern. As a deft craftsman, Nicholls structures the couple’s marriage within parentheses curiously titled “b.c. and a.c.”, that is Before Connie and After Connie. The avidity with which he constructs the characters and their respective lives in and around this space underscores a sharp empathetic intelligence which makes his writing dazzle with truth. The characters become indisputably believable. His narrative impeccability is heightened across 180 chapters with lower-cased titles such as “pompidou paris accordion cat amazing” and “lime, vodka, chewing gum” which are explained in their following sections in an effortless manner.
Another mark of Nicholls’s narrative dexterity and psychological plausibility are a couple of blank pages left at the end of the novel. These blank pages with another lower-cased title anticipate another life, probably, an equally captivating story, which awaits Douglas on the other side of the world.
Though Nicholls skilfully deploys a well-thought narrative structure, and within it, a conscientious Douglas, a flamboyant Connie, and a rebellious Albie, he leaves his readers a little disappointed through his conscious act of self-censorship. He asserts, “I am not a natural raconteur” or “I won’t say much”, whenever he is trying to talk about the closeness of Douglas’s relationship with Connie. The reiteration of “I won’t go into detail, except to say that it worked out pretty well for all concerned” seems more like indolence and a bit of diffidence on his part when it comes to talking about marriage.
Nonetheless, Us is a novel written with an uninterrupted simplicity that is hard to achieve. The collection of various epigraphs ranging from lorrie Moore’s Agnes of Iowa through Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd to Henry James’s The Portrait of a lady is a pleasure to read. They unleash the themes of the chapters quite creatively, engaging the readers at once.
As a novel, Us captures the problems that a couple may face over a period of a long romantic relationship, once so new, so full of potential and assurance, and so unpredictably metamorphic.The reviewer is a PhD Research Scholar in Comparative Indian literature in Delhi University