Set in the months leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, Lucy, a white 42 year old single mother of two, unexpectedly finds love with Joseph, a black 22 year old man of multiple part-time jobs. Just Like You follows the ups and downs of what an interracial relationship with a large age gap is like in a country getting more divided by the week.
I loved Nick Hornby’s early novels - High Fidelity, About a Boy and How to Be Good - but I lost interest starting with A Long Way Down (unfinished) and everything else that followed (Slam, Juliet, Naked) didn’t entice me back. It didn’t help that the screenplays he was writing were for some of the worst movies I’ve ever seen - An Education was an education in patience because it was torture to sit through!
But I decided to revisit Hornby to see if the old magic was still there and initially I was delighted to see that it was. Just Like You is a charming romance novel with an unusual setup and it was sweet to see Lucy and Joseph falling for each other. Some light conflict kept things interesting - Lucy’s drug addict/alcoholic ex showing up to cause trouble, Joseph being hassled by police for the “crime” of being black and in an affluent neighbourhood at night - until around the halfway point when things took a nosedive and never recovered.
The biggest problem is that Hornby doesn’t really have a story. Once Lucy and Joseph get together nothing much really happens. The ex disappears forever, and all that’s left are people’s reactions to the two appearing as a couple which gets repetitive and tiresome after a while. Joseph half-heartedly sees a couple girls and sorta tries making it as a DJ but neither go anywhere or mean anything. Lucy keeps saying things like “When you’re 50 I’ll be 70”. It’s so boring!
And then there’s the Brexit and racial stuff that clogs up most of the second half. I am so done with Brexit - I honestly never want to hear about it ever again, let alone read a novel featuring it prominently, and so having to read page after page of the same tedious arguments for leave/remain was so annoying. The racial angle is part of the reason why Hornby chose to write this book but a lot of the conversations Lucy and Joseph have about race are so contrived - Lucy says something, Joseph misconstrues it in this cliched “what do you mean ‘you people’?” way, and they make up, agreeing once again that Lucy isn’t really racist. No - obviously she’s not, so why does this sort of conversation have to keep happening?? Coupled with the Brexit shite and any enjoyment there was to be had was completely nixed.
Sure, race relations is a relevant topic, particularly in 2020, but Hornby doesn’t have to say about racism beyond it exists and it’s bad. Duh. It got so angsty in the second half of the book that I began to wonder why Lucy and Joseph were even a couple. Joseph gets on well with her kids and there’s obviously a physical attraction between him and Lucy, but the way Joseph kept bringing everything down to race/class made me think they shouldn’t have been a couple in the first place! It also made them less likeable as characters and they weren’t that amazing to start with.
I feel like Hornby really wanted to write a Brexit novel but was also aware that most people are fed up with hearing about Brexit so he got around it by conceiving Just Like You as a parable-esque novel about Brexit with Lucy representing Remain and Joseph representing Exit and taking the form of an appealing contemporary romance novel. Except Brexit and the near-constant banging on about class and race turns a fine romance story into dreary muck. It’s like he aimed for both and fell short twice so he fails at a romance story and he fails at a Brexit novel (even though the latter I’m pretty sure shouldn’t exist).
I’d have liked to have said that Nick Hornby was back to writing great novels like he did when he started out but, like other popular writers hellbent on being taken seriously and “literary”, Hornby sabotages what could have been a decent story firstly by dragging it out for too long without adding anything to justify the length, and then ignoring it altogether and choosing to focus on overbearing politics and ham-fisted social commentary instead.
By the time I got to the uninspired and flat ending, I was just relieved it was over and vowed never to bother with Hornby’s fiction again (his nonfiction Stuff I’ve Been Reading columns, collected in several books, remain the best things he’s written in recent years - if he restarted those, I’d read them, but only them). Just Like You is unfortunately just like poo.
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