Us

Portrait of a Marriage

The hapless Douglas Petersen is woken up by his wife at four in the morning and informed that their marriage has ended.

David Nicholls’s Us then takes the reader on a ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe, as Douglas tries to repair his marriage to Connie and connect with his surly son, Albie.

Nicholls’s last bestselling book One Day was about two very different people finally realizing that they are in love. Here too, he pairs two opposites-- the free-spirited aspiring artist Connie, and the straitlaced scientist Douglas. After a youth dissipated on sex, drugs and failure, she married him for the stability he offered, but over the 25 years they stayed together, their marriage was mostly a series of compromises, with some happy highs. 

Douglas and Connie lose their first child, the marriage is rocked further by Connie’s casual infidelity,  but Douglas loves her so much that he accepts her as she is, restless and often remote.  Without actively doing anything to turn Albie against his father, she manages to cause a rift between father and son.  She believes in letting the boy do what he wants; Douglas, in a slight old-fashioned parenting style he inherited from his strict father, tries to inculcate some discipline into their son. The result is Albie growing up into an odious teenager with no emotional bond with his father.

Before Connie sprang the shock on him, Douglas had carefully and lovingly planned a holiday to bring him closer to his hostile family, and over Albie’s protests they go ahead anyway.  A holiday embarked upon in such a bad spirit is bound to go wrong. At some point, Albie vanishes with a hippie-like girl called  Kat, Connie decides to return to London, and Douglas stubbornly carries on by himself, hoping to find his son and make amends—though he has nothing to apologise for, to his spoilt rotten son.

In a way, Us is the tragedy of a good man who  is unable to cope with ‘modern’ life, that to his wife implies a relationship without responsibility or loyalty.

In short chapters with eccentric lower case titles, Nicholls takes the reader into Douglas and Connie’s romantic past and juxtaposes it with the unhappy present. There are also insights into the places Douglas visits and how every unpleasant experience toughens him and also unbuttons his reticent personality.  He endears himself to the reader for being a decent man in a not so nice world.  If the open ends means a shot of happiness for him, at age fifty-four, he deserves it.

The book (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 204) is poignant, bitter-sweet and gently humorous—David Nicholls gets it right again.

Us

By David Nicholls

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Pages: 400