Nicholls manipulates the action with a farceur’s finesse, amping up the sexual heat only to have it thwarted by an inopportune text, lumpy twin beds or a landlady’s prim insistence on “no guests after 10, please!” Marnie and Michael keep ordering champagne, almost falling into each other’s arms and verging on passionate candor without quite crossing the finish line. And rather than growing foot-tappingly frustrating, this almost-but-not-quite gamesmanship becomes delicious, because each is such good company for the other and for the reader.
There are tickling digressions along the way, as when Nicholls encapsulates the joys and irritations of Michael’s job: “He was well liked as a teacher, more than he knew, although he could no longer pull off the larky irreverence required to be adored.” On Marnie, working to copy-edit the “opening orgy” in the manuscript of an absurdly pornographic saga called “Twisted Night,” he writes: “So disorienting was the action that she had to make notes on her napkin to establish everyone’s whereabouts, a complex web of arrows and initials, like a diagram of the Battle of Austerlitz.”
Nicholls builds his own erotic and at times wrenchingly emotional suspense as the would-be lovers reveal past mishaps and surrendered dreams, both imagining themselves to be hopelessly damaged and undesirable. They force themselves to listen to each other’s playlists, a nightmarish test of compatibility. And they share recaps of their capsized marriages; the self-protectively clever Marnie initially makes her recounting too entertainingly glib, almost a standup routine, while Michael hoards his most painful memories, collecting pebbles along the walk to convince himself that he’s still functional, not “cracked and vulnerable, like a cup with a glued-on handle.”
Nicholls is rightfully attached to his central couple and their baggage of cherished neuroses, until he accepts that he has to decide on a happy ending or something more bittersweet, and how to earn either. He succeeds beautifully. Nicholls’s dialogue is flawless (he’s also an experienced screenwriter) and even his descriptions of bogs and muck can enchant. The novel is sharp-tongued and irresistible, the most intelligent treat.
And while I’d never want to trek through so much wooded British acreage, or get so poundingly hung over after sweaty, fragrant pub crawls, “You Are Here” makes its woebegone adventures feel consistently festive and heartbreaking. As my mother always told me, “A little fresh air won’t kill you.” And as I reliably replied, “You don’t know that.”
YOU ARE HERE | By David Nicholls | Harper | 368 pp. | $30
