Just Like You

Nick Hornby is back with a charming, perceptive and surprisingly hopeful portrayal of a May-December romance. I have to admit that the most interesting aspect of this book to me, as an ignorant American, was its portrayal of the 2016 Brexit vote. It provided me with a much more nuanced view of the reasons people voted the way they did than the “Stay=good and progressive, Leave=bad and racist” version I picked up from the American media coverage.

I guess that's one of the book's themes though - nothing is as simple as it seems. Lucy is a white 42 year old schoolteacher, and Joseph is a black 22 year old “portfolio worker” (fancy way of saying he has a bunch of part-time jobs), and on paper they have nothing in common. But for some reason, they like talking together and eventually sleeping together. They don't have shared interests and they can't really hang out with their respective friend groups, but they like watching The Sopranos and having sex. Outside of Lucy's young sons, who love having someone to play video games with, nobody understands why they are involved, but despite several breakups, they eventually decide that although what they have may not be permanent, it's working for them now. They just like each other (as the title promises), and isn't that enough?

As always, Nick Hornby is incredibly funny and wryly observant about human nature. The first scene finds Lucy standing in line at the butcher shop with a horrible woman whose kids used to be in the same preschool playgroup as Lucy's sons. The universal experience of being stuck with someone you don't like but can't avoid is fodder in Hornby's hands for humor, insights in Lucy's character, observations about casual racism, and the “meet cute/awkward” for Lucy and Joseph. And the stage is set for 300 pages of humor and human nature, wrapped up not so much with a bow but with a good tidy knot that will take some work to untie.

It used to bother me that Nick Hornby got so much attention for writing the male equivalent of Women's Fiction, and that if his name was Nicola Hornby he wouldn't be half as famous. But I've given up being bitter; there are far too few really well written contemporary love stories with at least somewhat happy endings that become best sellers, and I can't afford to scorn any of them in the dumpster fire of 2020.