Us

This is a difficult book for me to review, because there are basically only four characters in the book, and I absolutely could not stand three of them. It was actually painful for me to read it, just because I didn’t like them so much. But that has no bearing on whether or not the book is well-written or tells a good story, and in fact, many reviewers have loved this book.

The story is narrated by Douglas Petersen, 54, whose wife of 20 years, Connie, tells him at the beginning of this book “I think our marriage has run its course. I think I want to leave you.” But their only child, a 17-year-old son named Albie, is about to go off to college, and they have already planned a “Grand Tour” of Europe for the three of them before show more Albie leaves in the fall. They decide to go through with it, “for Albie’s sake.”

Alternating with Douglas’s account of what happened on this trip, he goes back in time to chart the course of his marriage to Connie. Granted, this is just his point of view, and I suppose if this book were by Gillian Flynn we might get a book in two halves with Connie’s perspective represented. But not hearing her take on the marriage except from Douglas’s eyes, I grew to detest Connie, Albie, and Kat, the girl Albie picks up mid-trip in Europe. Moreover, I can’t imagine what kept Douglas and Connie together for even a moment, not to mention twenty years, except that Douglas seemed overwhelmed by Connie’s looks, and - as a science geek without much experience with women - he idolized her and felt lucky to be the object of her attention. Or derision and contempt, depending on how you see it. Albie’s behavior was [also] execrable, and Connie’s endorsement of it irresponsible and cruel. And Kat actually made Albie look good by comparison. While I liked Douglas more than the others, his constant bowing and scraping to these cruel and boorish people led to a diminution of my respect for him.

Many reviewers have found Douglas “lovable” and “humorously self-deprecating.” I just had to shake my head.

Evaluation: I disliked this book, but it was very much tied to my loathing of the characters. If you don’t mind dysfunctional families and non-likable protagonists, you will appreciate this story much more than I. It made the Man Booker 2014 Longlist. show less

Story of a marriage told in first person by Douglas Petersen, a scientist, whose wife, Connie, tells him she “thinks she needs to end their relationship” after twenty-two years of marriage. Douglas tells of how they met and early years, alternating with their present-day trip around Europe with their seventeen-year-old son, Albie. Douglas is a biochemist who prefers a structured and practical life. Connie is free-spirited artist who now runs an educational program. Their son takes after his mother and has a turbulent relationship with his father.

I often complain that I cannot find a humorous book that appeals to me. Well, I’ve found one. There is lots of dry humor in this story, and I laughed out loud many times. The journey show more around European cities provides plenty of opportunities for situational comedy, as well as insight into the relationships between the family members. Of course, the book is not entirely comedic, since it about a marriage in crisis. It is wonderfully written. Even though we are only getting Douglas’s side of the story, the author is so skilled at portraying the family’s interactions that we get a good sense of the bigger picture. The reader can start to understand the dynamics that have led to marital difficulties. It is a story of life and its ups and downs. The characters are beautifully drawn. They are easy to envision and realistic. I felt totally engrossed in the story and am adding it to my list of favorites. show less

Douglas Petersen is awoken in the middle of the night by his wife, Connie, telling him that she wants to leave him. Their son, Albie, is heading to college/university in the fall, and she feels that their job as a couple is done. Douglas is devastated: he considers himself by far the luckier half of the couple and would be bereft without her. But Connie says they don't need to separate right away; the three of them are planning a Grand Tour of Europe over the summer, so maybe Douglas can change Connie's mind and make her stay?

This is the story of that Grand Tour and the whole history of Douglas and Connie's relationship, including the story of Albie's upbringing. The three of them take it in turns to amuse, enchant, exasperate and stir show more the sympathy of the reader. Because Douglas is the narrator, we get more of his perspective, and there are some moments where you may want to roll your eyes at him or worse. (For example, his initial description of present-day Albie seems unnecessarily harsh.) But as a rather neurotic person myself, I could relate a lot to his perspective of the world -- especially about wanting to have everything planned out and being afraid of letting one's guard down. I must also confess to being on his level in terms of art appreciation: not really knowing what I'm supposed to think about the art or even really what I like.

This book covers a lot of topics: love, relationships, generation gaps, art, wanting to understand and be understood, grief, societal conventions, the wonders of modern Europe, amusing linguistic difficulties, and more. It made me chuckle on the bus and also nearly made me cry in public, those prickly would-be tears that you know won't end well if you indulge them.

Given the weight of expectations (after all, this is the follow-up to One Day, which was massively popular), there are bound to be people who are disappointed with this book. I am not one of them. I liked this book very much and am looking forward to rereading it. The only thing stopping me from giving it five stars is that it was perhaps a bit too long, with some things that could feasibly have been edited out (e.g. the throwaway remark about Albie revealing that he is gay, because it's literally one sentence and Douglas doesn't discuss it any further).

Recommended if you liked Nicholls' other work, although maybe wait until the initial excitement has subsided if that's what you tend to do with highly popular/hyped books. show less

I found this novel a fabulous read. It made me smile and weep as I travelled alongside Douglas and experienced his marriage and family life. Douglas and Connie have been married over 20 years. In the dead of night she announces that their marriage has run its course. Douglas is not ready to face this and they embark on a family holiday of a lifetime, a grand tour of Europe by train, visiting the galleries of different cities to show great art to their son, Albie, who is interested in photography. This is a grand tour that is doomed from the beginning and I cringed at the tension between Douglas and Albie. The reader is with Douglas, it is his version of events we hear and it is occasionally painful and often funny and sometimes both. In show more the short chapters he tells us about the holiday and also reminisces about how he and Connie met and married and had a daughter who died and then Albie. Some stories, such as when Douglas sat up until late into the night glueing together Albie's Lego bricks into castles etc is touchingly tender. He did this for love but his son and wife were astonished and horrified. And then, after he has publicly insulted Albie, their son heads off on his own and Douglas decides to search for him using scientific principles. There are plenty of amusing adventures until the end of the book. The story is told sympathetically, about what may not ordinarily be a sympathetic character. Douglas is difficult to like at first but he grew on me. show less

This is the story of a family. Douglas, the father, is of that repressed and careful character that is a staple stereotype of English men. He loves his wife and son, he really does, but he shows it in reprimands and awkwardness. He's also a biochemist who is frustrated and confused by his seventeen year old son's love of photography and sloth. He doesn't mean to be unsupportive, but he does think that Albie should really look for a field of study that he is more likely to be successful in than photography. His wife, Connie, had seen him at the beginning of their relationship as reassuring, like the Shipping Forecast, but now seems to regard him more as just dull. She has suggested that they separate when their son leaves for university, show more but not earlier. Leaving them to face one last family vacation; a Grand Tour of Europe.

David Nicholls, like Nick Hornsby and Helen Fielding, writes entertaining books that aren't quite literary fiction, but also aren't easy to dismiss as trifling. Nicholls has an easy style of writing, which allows him room to explore difficult themes and ideas lightly. Here it's the end of a marriage, the inability of people who love each other to communicate, even when they truly want to. This should be dire, but it's enjoyably readable. There's also a great deal about art, from the point of view of someone who has a hard time seeing more than what is concretely on the canvas, who has the misfortune to travel with two people who have made visual arts their primary interest. There's a fair bit of slapstick comedy here, but it doesn't overshadow the heart at the centre of this story. show less

They say that opposites attract, right? My husband and I are certainly opposites in many ways but our opposing ideas are generally superficial. He likes comic book movies and thrillers; I like rom-coms. He loves meeting strangers; I'd rather go to the dentist for a root canal. He likes tv; I love books. And on and on. In all the ways that really matter though, our view of the world, our desires for the future, our theories on how to raise our kids, we are very similar. Twenty-five years on, I suppose we could have grown alike rather than started that way but I suspect that the fundamentals were always there. And that is why it was so very curious and intriguing to read about Douglas and Connie, characters in David Nicholls' newest show more novel, Us, who started out fundamentally different and who have never really bridged that gap in all the years of their marriage.

Douglas and Connie Petersen have been married for twenty-five years and have a seventeen year old son, Albie. They have planned a month long Grand Tour of Europe and its spectacular art, their last family vacation before Albie leaves for college. But even before they leave, Connie wakes Douglas in the middle of the night and tells him that she thinks their marriage has run its course and she might leave him when they come back from Europe. The news is a terrible blow to Douglas, whose world has been made brighter for so long by the arty and worldly Connie's presence in it. Since the vacation is still going ahead, Douglas intends to try and repair the damage with his wife, damage he has been ignorant of for the most part, to rescue his marriage and to try and connect with the spoiled, sullen Albie as well.

But what vacation goes as planned? There are tender moments but there's also bickering and misunderstanding and wrong-footedness too. There's a spectacular lack of communication and unrealized expectations. Douglas narrates the novel looking back at the trip and even further back at his long history with Connie. He is as straight and milquetoast as you might expect a biochemist to be but has a wonderfully witty turn of phrase, even when he doesn't realize he's being funny. He is unflinchingly honest about his own acknowledgement of his mediocrity and the fact that he should never have ended up with a vibrant and unique Connie. He details and defends his conventionality as he realizes that it is this constrained, uber-planned manner that has him so often at odds with his free-spirited wife and son. And yet he cannot let go of the very safe conventions that are such a part of his fabric. As the three Petersens travel around Europe, he tries very hard, commenting on the famous art in ways that just make Connie and Albie shake their heads. But it has always been a bit of mother and son against dad in their family and this trip just highlights that all the more. None of it is entirely unexpected though. It's only when the whole thing goes tits up that Douglas starts to really think deeply about the future and his relationships with both Connie and Albie.

Nicholls skillfully weaves both the trip and the previous twenty-five years together in Douglas' first person narration. And using Douglas to narrate makes the reader much more sympathetic to someone who might otherwise be the less appealing character. Douglas' confused honesty, his attempts to do or say the right thing and yet still missing the point entirely, his introspection about his fundamental differences with Connie and why staying with her is so important to him, and his sincere desire to be the hero of the family all combine to make him a pitiable and yet engaging character. As he narrates, the reader also gets a good sense of Connie and Albie's characters too, especially when Douglas looks back with regret for choices he made along the way. Nicholls is a fantastic writer and the fate of this mismatched family is one that really gets under the reader's skin. There are moments of predictability for anyone who has themselves been in a long relationship but they heighten the realism of the tale and then are often turned on their heads in the end anyway. The story is a poignant look at marriage and parenting, a beautiful rendering of growing up and out-growing the life you've created. show less

“And it occurred to me that perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost” (184).

Does the end of a marriage always mean failure? For a book full of realistic snapshots about the messiness of marriage and family, there wasn’t really another way it could’ve ended. But, still, it was so sad, even if it was inevitable. Maybe the saddest part wasn’t the ending of their marriage but the marriage to begin with. While I absolutely love Nicholls’s narrator’s voices—characters who are such regular, average, forgettable people, everyone and anyone all at once—and while I laughed out loud on nearly every page of the first half of this novel, I never really—not once—understood the show more connection between Connie and Douglas. They were too different, their contrasts not complimentary at all. They seemed more rough sandpaper than smooth yin-yang, constantly irritating each other (and sometimes the reader).

Although the characters’ chemistry was absent at times, there are a lot of qualities that made this a worthwhile read: the understated wit had me in tears at times and the relationships between spouses and parents and children had me relating more often than not. I love that these characters and their relationships are so messy. Watching Douglas battle insecurities, feeling excluded and censured because of it was oddly therapeutic—as was witnessing him and all of his parenting mistakes. It’s hard to be wired differently from our kids, dealing with unmet expectations which leads to disappointment which leads to regrets which leads to parent guilt. That shit is real. It’s nice to know that those challenges are normal—there’s comfort in that camaraderie, that parenting club that can feel so lonely at times. There’s also a gentle warning to be had: our own issues and insecurities can end up cultivating that inner voice of our children or spouse, leading to broken relationships sometimes past the point of repair.

Besides the characters’ marriage being past the point of repair, the story became a bit broken for me a little more than halfway through. Like Connie, I was ready to call it quits and go home. The search for Albie got a little tiresome. The final plea of Douglas was pretty painful. The reunion of Connie and Angelo felt a little cheap. And after Albie’s pity-motivated phone call, I couldn’t muster up much hope for poor Douglas, even with his search for Danish Freya. show less