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A couple of issues

Last Updated 23 May 2015, 15:36 IST

Us
David Nicholls,
Hachette 2014,
pp 399, Rs.599

Nominated for the Man Booker Prize, running four pages short of 400 and wrapped up in a vivid, orangish-red cover, David Nicholls’s Us has been reaping praise as the bestseller of 2014.

Reasons are not hard to find. Eminently readable, witty and laced with distress, misunderstandings and incompatibilities, David Nicholls summons Paul Morel into the 21st century with a stark difference — the Lawrentian Oedipal drama unfolds on a more globalised plane of existence here.  An ordinary middle class family with its characteristic aspirations located anywhere in the world would identify with Connie, the artist mother, Douglas Peterson, the biochemist father, and Albie, their only son who is trying his best to come to terms with his father.

A far cry from the Morel family of the last century. But the elemental passions are there, all the same. Fierce possessiveness, father-son rivalry, mother-son bonding, mother’s disenchantment with the quarter-century-old marriage and the father’s crumbling inside as his domestic bliss crashes around him. And this estrangement between the father and the son is aggravated by the mid-marriage crisis Douglas and Connie are trying to sort out through a family holiday in Europe. But Connie is a different woman, independent, conscious of the limits and possibilities of love.

Pitch black, self-disparaging humour is the hallmark of a narrative that unfolds through Douglas’s rational, practical and no-nonsense wisdom. The travel narrative cuts into the memories of their romance, marriage, sweet nothings, embarrassments, the hopelessness that sets in after the death of the first baby and the tragic lack of communication between father and son. Connie the artist does carry the hangover of her youthful Bohemian life in her smooth acceptance of Albie’s follies and foibles. Douglas puts himself apologetically into the slot of a conformist but there is a desperate sadness and a pathetic beauty in the way he tries to reach out to his son. Nicholls weaves an intense psychological drama out of an everyday marriage gone awry.

The story begins on the intriguing note of Connie broaching the idea of a breakup. The European holiday is a kind of swansong to a life lived together and erred together. But here the equation reverses — an imaginative and romantic Connie is enviably realistic about a marriage on the rocks while Douglas is struggling and faltering often even as he tries to come to terms. There are moments of introspection where the pressures of living up to the image of an ideal husband crack him up. Understatement, irony and levity lighten the heaviness a little but sets off the melancholic more acutely.

Douglas offers himself as a study for embattled masculinity, while Connie is a little unbelievably easy with the nouveau femininity she embodies. The funereal mood of a marriage on its last legs is speckled with glimpses of an artistic Europe through its museums and historic sites, thus fusing together a domestic crisis and a travel narrative into a funny cocktail. A tour through Europe shows up the inter-generational rifts through the gaps that yawn between Albie and his Dad, which climax in Albie eloping with a nomadic girlfriend half way through the holiday. After a futile search for their son, as Connie boards back to England, Douglas springs a surprise by opting to stay back to search for his son and bring him back home.

The rest of the novel is a bit of a Ulyssean voyage with a difference. Ulysses chases after a Telemachus who is angry, upset and not exactly in love with his father. Here is a father who is craving to be accepted by a son who he was apologetic about a few pages back. Which is why Albie storms out of the cocoon in sheer indignation and righteous fury. Much later, on his (mis)adventure to find his son, Douglas learns the perilous truth from Kat, Albie’s girlfriend, that his son is actually paranoid about failing his father.

A father who dreams his son to be a resounding success in life so that in an apocalyptic future he would still survive — a typical middle class angst that wishes to ensure security for generations to come. Willy Loman’s ghost haunts several nooks and crannies of the book while Connie, in spite of her sharp intelligence, emotional strength, boldness and spiritual independence, seems to defy archetypes. There are hints at Albie’s gay identity that is said to have surfaced in the days to come, but the narrative time just about skirts the issue with a casual mention. Despite a dramatic cardiac attack in Madrid when the family bonds once again to nurse Douglas back to health, Connie and Douglas do split, much against Douglas’s hopes and fears.

At 52, Connie finds a new authentic life through a past love, thus freeing Douglas to move on in search of his own authentic spirit. Even as the closing chapter begins and ends enigmatically, named after the dentist-lover he found on his lonely European sojourn, gesturing towards the promise of a companionship, home remains an elusive idea. And the book comes to a wistful halt on this note, “I’ll find my own way home.”

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(Published 23 May 2015, 15:36 IST)

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