Few romance novels have a gimmick as brilliant as David Nicholls' "One Day." In an effort to understand a relationship through minimalist details, he chooses to explore how a couple reunite once a year to figure out where they are in life. What starts as bright-eyed youths with their own aspirations slowly evolves into different career paths. While later chapters feature them not interacting at all, the early run is some of the finest explorations of the optimism of love and how brilliant everything seems at the offset. With the shift of each decade (both of characters and time) comes new challenges to the novel. New worldviews form and the concept of desire shifts slightly. Can love sustain the struggles of time, or is everything doomed to be forgotten? Certain people remain pivotal to personal growth. Time moves on, but the memories don't. This novel is nostalgic and glossy without resorting to kitsch. Instead, it feels raw, honest, and likely to leave the reader contemplative of their own relationships.
By emphasizing the nature of a day, especially one as arbitrary as St. Swiven's Day, Nicolls reflects how lacking routine certain parts of life is. While certain rituals are formed over time, it's not always a guarantee that next year will be met with the fondness that last year had. It's likely that some years are even downright unexceptional. What is there to look back on? Instead of getting caught up in gimmickry, the author's success is found in the way he paints these characters' interests shifting over time. They find careers that impact their interpersonal dynamics. Inside jokes come and go in ways that reward astute readers. Everything has a beauty beyond the intimacy of the characters, allowing for an interactive nature to be formed. The reader is left pondering what they found meaningful in their own lives at any given time. It leaves them recognizing that every day matters, even if nothing happens at all.
The best part is that it's a fairly unconventional approach to romance. Even as Nicholls emphasizes the love that exists between his protagonists, there is a world outside of their naivety. They become adults with complicated interiority by the end. With a finale that perfectly depicts the maturity of growing older, this is a story that lands every chapter with triumph. It comes across as a scrapbook of memories assembled to build a larger character study. It may not always seem insightful to go through every page, but somewhere in the small details is a reminder of life. Everyday is a reason to find something new to appreciate. It may not always make sense but, when removing the outside context, it can come to mean everything in the world.
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