Us

A Marriage on Tour

David Nicholls’s Us, published in 2014 and longlisted for the Booker Prize, is a warm, funny, and quietly moving novel about marriage, parenthood, and the reckonings of middle age — the follow-up to his enormously popular One Day, and a confirmation of his gift for emotionally intelligent fiction that blends genuine humor with real feeling. Nicholls is one of the most beloved of contemporary British popular novelists, prized for his sympathetic characters, his wry comic voice, and his ability to make readers laugh and cry in equal measure, and Us deploys those gifts in the service of a poignant, funny, bittersweet story of a man trying to hold his family together. It is a gentler, more mature, and more domestic book than One Day, and while it lacks that novel’s devastating emotional impact, it is an affecting and rewarding read in its own right.

The novel is narrated by Douglas Petersen, a careful, anxious, buttoned-up biochemist whose comfortable middle-aged life is upended when his wife, Connie — warmer, more artistic, more spontaneous than he — tells him, on the eve of a long-planned grand tour of Europe with their nearly-grown son, that she thinks their marriage has run its course and that she may leave him once their son departs for university. Determined not to give up, Douglas resolves to use the European trip — a cultural tour of the great cities, museums, and art of the continent — to win back Connie’s love and to repair his strained relationship with his moody teenage son, Albie, with whom he has never connected. The novel alternates between the present-day tour, which goes increasingly and comically awry, and Douglas’s recollections of his marriage, from the unlikely beginning of his courtship of the vivacious Connie through the decades of their life together. As the trip unravels and Douglas’s earnest efforts misfire, the book builds toward a tender, clear-eyed reckoning with love, family, and the passage of time.

Warmth, Humor, and Emotional Intelligence

The strengths of Us are the strengths that have made Nicholls so beloved: warmth, humor, and emotional intelligence. The novel is genuinely funny, much of its comedy arising from Douglas himself — his anxiousness, his cluelessness, his earnest, hapless efforts to do the right thing and connect with a wife and son who often baffle him — and from the mishaps of the European tour. But beneath the comedy runs real feeling and insight. Nicholls writes with sympathy and acuity about the difficulties of long marriage (the way love and incompatibility can coexist, the way two people can drift apart while still caring deeply), about the pain and bafflement of parenthood (Douglas’s love for a son he cannot understand or reach), and about the reckonings of middle age. The interwoven story of Douglas and Connie’s marriage, from hopeful beginning to troubled present, is touching and recognizable, and the novel’s emotional honesty gives its comedy weight.

Douglas himself is the key to the book. Narrating in his own anxious, precise, self-aware voice, he is a sympathetic and quietly affecting figure — limited and exasperating in some ways, but decent, loving, and trying his best, and Nicholls makes us care about his earnest, doomed-seeming campaign to save his family. The choice to tell the story through this careful, buttoned-up man, rather than the more obviously appealing Connie, is a clever one, generating both comedy and pathos and slowly revealing the depth of feeling beneath Douglas’s controlled surface. By the end, his journey — geographical, marital, and paternal — has become genuinely moving, and the novel’s bittersweet wisdom about love and family lingers.

In the Shadow of One Day

The honest challenge for Us is the inevitable comparison with One Day, the phenomenon that preceded it. One Day was a publishing sensation with a famously devastating emotional impact, and many readers came to Us expecting a similar gut-punch. Us is a quieter, gentler, more domestic and mature book, and it does not deliver the same emotional wallop; its pleasures are softer and more diffuse — the steady accumulation of warmth, humor, and recognition rather than a single shattering blow. This is a deliberate and defensible choice, and arguably Us is the more grown-up novel, but readers hoping to be devastated as they were by One Day may find it comparatively muted, and judge it the lesser book on that basis. Taken on its own terms, rather than against its predecessor, it is more satisfying.

Douglas’s narration, too, while the source of much of the book’s comedy and pathos, can be exasperating by design. His anxiousness, his cluelessness, his controlling tendencies, and his repeated missteps are deliberately frustrating — we are meant to find him both sympathetic and maddening, as his wife and son do — and some readers find spending a whole novel in his head wearing, wishing for relief from his limited, fretful perspective. This is a calculated effect, essential to the book’s comedy and to its gradual revelation of Douglas’s hidden depths, but it means the reading experience can occasionally be as trying as it is endearing. Readers’ mileage with Douglas will vary, and with it their enjoyment of the book.

A Warm, Bittersweet Read

Us is a warm, funny, quietly moving novel of marriage, parenthood, and middle age — a gentler, more mature follow-up to One Day that confirms David Nicholls’s gift for emotionally intelligent fiction that makes readers laugh and feel in equal measure. Anchored by the sympathetic, exasperating, ultimately affecting figure of Douglas, it offers sharp, tender insight into long marriage, the bafflements of parenthood, and the reckonings of midlife. It lacks the devastating impact of its predecessor and its narrator can wear, but as a humane, bittersweet comedy of family life, it is a genuine pleasure.

For readers who enjoy warm, funny, emotionally intelligent fiction about marriage and family, Us is a rewarding and affecting read.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A warm, funny, quietly moving novel of marriage, parenthood, and middle age. Nicholls’s wry, sympathetic voice makes Douglas’s European grand tour genuinely affecting and sharp on long marriage and family. It lacks the emotional wallop of One Day and its narrator can exasperate by design, but it’s a humane, bittersweet pleasure.

For more warm, funny fiction of love and family, see One Day, The Rosie Project, and A Man Called Ove.