One Day by David Nicholls

If you have a one-night stand with someone who becomes your best friend, is that a touching story of human connection, or a lesson in how not to have a one-night stand? Well, both.

One Day, a novel by David Nicholls, explores the twenty-ish-year relationship of Dexter and Emma, two young Brits who cross paths for the first time on the night they graduate from college in 1988. The book checks in on them every subsequent year on the same date, July 15 (St. Swithin's Day). (There's a reason behind this structure, which you find considerably later in the narrative.) After an exceptionally awkward--but cute--night together, they find they can't cut each other loose or make the decision to become lovers for real. So they take the platonic path by default.

Dexter, a charmed kid all around, heads out on postgrad travel to figure things out (read: spend his parents' money while "finding himself" in India, Dublin, Venice, etc.). Meanwhile, Emma, an earnest and practical suburban girl, is stuck with a more pedestrian self-discovery process in England. But they stay in touch--Dexter's brief, cheerful postcards cross paths with her long, self-consciously cute letters for that first year. And somehow, they end up as each other's de facto best friend.

The next few years find Dexter's life moving upward (he's got television career opportunities and more girls than he can handle), and Emma's settling in somewhere around "aimless despair." There are some painful near-misses, as they alternate being the one who contemplates pursuing something deeper (mostly on her part, though there's an especially cringe-inducing letter that Dexter decides not to send). But for the most part, they settle into a pattern: Dexter sleeps with anything attractive that crosses his path, and takes it for granted that "good old Em" will be there whenever he needs companionship (unless a better sex or party option comes up). Emma unintentionally keeps all her other relationships at arm-distance in case Dexter changes his mind. Once they're both settled in London, it becomes a form of "just friends" kabuki, with specific rules and expectations.

Over the years, their circumstances shift and their relationship shifts (spouses, baby, career success, career failure, an estrangement, etc.), but their codependence is such that you know that no matter how douchey Dexter gets (and it gets pretty heinous) or how neurotic Emma gets, there's no walking away from that shared history. It's an honest, sometimes brutal portrait of a relationship between two people who know on some level that they need to be together--but just can't verbalize it or push it to the next level. And the best thing that Nicholls does is make Dexter and Emma appealing and funny enough that even in their most unpleasant individual moments, you still want them to get together (or kill the other one once and for all) on the next July 15th. The ebbs and flows, like and dislike, lust and meh, feel awfully real as the advantage pings back and forth between them over the years.

Also entertaining is the time span: 1988 - 2007. It's basically a rousing game of "hey, remember the 90s"? Dexter becomes a VJ-type microcelebrity who hosts various loud pop culture shows on TV. Emma works at an obnoxious American Tex-Mex chain restaurant in London, and dates an aspiring stand-up comedian who bases his material on observational humor. From the clothes to the hair, the little touches are cute.

The writing itself is solid and Hornby-esque: engaging, full of self-amusing references, and extremely readable. The structure, the once-a-year check-in, keeps the narrative from getting too bunchy. And it lets Nicholls keep the sentimentality to a minimum (until the somewhat maudlin ending, which didn't thrill me). In fact, some of the cuts and revelations are flat-out merciless, because they have to be. I appreciated the fact that this forces the writer and reader to look at the long-term implications for both Dexter and Emma, not just the endless present that most novels would pick. And it'll translate well into its movie incarnation--especially because the story's not as predictable as you might expect.

Overall, a satisfying read.

Parts I liked:

"She had imagined this arrangement to be sophisticated, modern, a new design for living. But so much effort is required to pretend that they don't want to be together that it has recently seemed inevitable that one of them will crack. She just hadn't expected it to be Dexter."

"Sometimes, she thought, she missed the intensity....of the early days of their friendship. She remembered writing ten-page letters late into the night; insane, passionate things full of dopey sentiment and barely hidden meanings, exclamation marks and underlining. For a while she had written daily postcards too, on top of the hour-long phone calls just before bed. That time in the flat in Dalston when they had stayed up talking and listening to records, only stopping when the sun began to rise, or at his parents' house, swimming in the river on New Year's Day, or that afternoon drinking absinthe in the secret bar in Chinatown; all of these moments and more were recorded and stored in notebooks and letters and wads of photographs, endless photographs. there was a time, it must have been in the early nineties, when they were barely able to pass a photo-booth without cramming inside it, because they had yet to take each other's permanent presence for granted."