Book Review: One Day

     It’s hard to remember, when reading a book, that you can’t truly judge a piece of art until you take in the whole thing.  This comes easy with a painting or a sculpture that you can take in with one look or with a poem or a song that you can take in over a couple short minutes.  A book is a different beast.  Most of us spend days, if not weeks and months, with one book and one can’t really take in the book as a whole piece of art until they read that last word at the end of that last sentence at the bottom of that last page.  In this day and age of instant Facebook updates and spontaneous tweets it has become damn near impossible for any of us to hold off our opinions for five minutes forget about the few days it takes to plow through a novel, especially for those of us who look to critique everything.  I find myself starting to write my book reviews in my head after reading just a few pages and this just isn’t fair to the author and the piece of art they have created.  Would it be fair to look at only half of Starry Night to determine its place in art history?  Would you be totally just in saying “Maneater” by Hall and Oates is a terrible song if you only listened to the first verse?

            I ran into this problem recently while reading One Day by David Nicholls.  After the first few chapters I was already preparing what I was going to write about it.  And then everything changed.  The story took a turn I wasn’t ready for and story suddenly took on a much more profound meaning.  In all honesty, most of what I was going to write before still rings true.  You may not be able to judge a painting as a whole from only seeing half of it, but you can make judgments about things like brush stroke and color combinations.  You can hear a few seconds of a poem and make judgments about word choice.  My first impression of One Day was it was a Nick Hornby novel mixed with the movie When Harry Met Sally.  To be fair to Mr. Nicholls, I’m a huge Hornby fan and my comparison of this novel to his work may just have more to do with the fact that they are both British then a repeating of style.  I haven’t spent enough time reading modern British literature to make that distinction.  One thing I am sure of is the characters felt extremely stereotypical.  Dexter, the male protagonist, was your typical male playboy who is too involved with his image and party lifestyle to admit to himself or others that Emma is the perfect girl for him.  Emma, the female protagonist, was your typical strong female who is lacking the self-esteem to feel she deserves a good looking boyfriend and a fruitful career.  Although the interplay with the two was well written and at times very funny, I didn’t feel like I was reading anything new.  I’ve spent time with these characters before and felt I knew where the story was going, which is probably why I was so surprised with how it ended.

            The thing that makes this novel readable right from the get go is its very original structure.  As the title suggests, each chapter is one day of the year in the lives of the protagonists, June 15.  Each chapter leaves one year of back-story the reader needs to be caught up on.  If anything else, this structure keeps you reading as you try to figure out what happened over the course of the year.  How did the characters get from there to here?  If the chapter starts with Dexter, you want to read to find out where Emma is.  If is starts with Emma, vise versa for Dex.  The fact that the characters themselves feel so cliché is trumped by a structure that pulls you through the plot.  But it’s not until the end that the structure makes complete sense, that it goes from an interesting gimmick to an artistic statement. 

            One Day is not a great novel, but it is a very enjoyable read.  It won’t take you long to get through.  The writing is funny and moving and the structure makes you want to keep reading.  But what I took away most from the novel was the reminder to be patient with my reading.  Let the artist paint the whole picture before you judge its merit.  The novelist sometimes needs 300 pages to complete the picture, so judgment should be reserved until all 300 are read.