Nick Hornby’s latest romance novel is about loving against all odds
- 22 Oct 2020
Nick Hornby has won a legion of fans with wry novels such as “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy,” and his latest, “Just Like You,” is about the romantic challenges of connecting with another person, especially when it is seemingly against all the odds.
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Lucy, a white, middle-aged teacher who has split from her alcoholic husband, falls for Joseph, a part-time butcher, football coach, leisure centre worker, and aspiring DJ.
He is black, working-class and, at 22, some 20 years her junior.
This is a distinctly north London novel, down to the references to Kentish Town and Chalk Farm restaurants, the characters and the dinner party Brexit debates (it is mainly set during the 2016 vote).
Hornby’s portrait of the Islington elite is far from flattering.
“Everyone I know is miserable,” says the vapid Sophie, one of the bored, frustrated women (with their “four-by-fours, their private schools and their new b*****s”) who appear in the novel.
Lucy is head of English at a local secondary school, although in truth she seems far less exhausted than most real teachers I know by the end of a school year.
The most touching moments are when she admits to painful self-doubt about whether she is just a “rapacious and deluded older woman,” one who has no business messing around with a man who sometimes has more in common with her pre-teen video game-obsessed sons Dylan and Al.
As you would expect from Arsenal fan Hornby, the man who wrote “Fever Pitch,” there are lots of football references and sly sporting jokes, including digs at horse racing and motor racing.
The novel explores division and racism and has its share of sharp observations that help illuminate what it means to fall headlong in love with someone who is nothing like you at all.
It may simply be a failing on my part that, for all the assured touch of the author, “Just Like You” never truly ignited any passion.
The Independent