David Nicholls is quickly turning into an Author I Adore. I loved his One Day (book AND surprisingly well-done movie) as well as The Understudy, so I was looking forward to his newest novel.
Us is about Connie and Dan, a long-married couple whose son is graduating. They have a Grand Tour planned when Connie tells Douglas that she doesn't want to be married anymore. But they go on the trip anyway, and, unsurprisingly, things go awry. A lovely meditation on marriage and love, featuring flawed characters and realistic situations. Nicholls has such wonderful insights into emotion and love, and he has such marvelous, humorous turns of phrase. Like:
"Other people's sex lives are a little like other people's holidays: you're glad they had fun but you weren't there and don't necessarily want to see the photos. At our age too much detail leads to a certain amount of mental whistling and staring at shoes, and there's also the problem of vocabulary. Scientific terms, though clinically accurate, don't really convey the heady dark intensity, etc., etc. and I'd like to avoid simile of metaphor -- valley, orchid, garden, that kind of thing. Certainly I have no intention of using a whole load of swear words. So I won't go into detail, except to say that it worked out pretty well for all concerned, with that pleasant sense of self-satisfaction, as if we'd discovered that we were still capable of performing a forward roll. Afterwards we lay in a tangle of limbs." (p. 71)