The two tales of 'One Day'

IF YOU haven't read One Dayyet, you probably will soon. It's currently sitting pretty at the top of the Irish and UK paperback charts, has replaced Stieg Larssen's Millenniumnovels as this year's must-have commuter carry-on, is rampaging around book clubs with the relentlessness of a summer cold and will this week appear at a cinema near you in the form of a glossy rom-com starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess.

If you haven’t read David Nicholl’s tale of on-again, off-again friendship and romance – or even if you have – you might well be wondering what all the fuss is about. So here’s the deal. The book opens on July 15th, 1988. Having spent a drunken night together after their graduation at Edinburgh University, Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew agree to go their separate ways and be Just Good Friends.

Each subsequent chapter checks in with the characters on July 15th over a 20-year period, wherever they happen to be. Which is? Well, despite her first-class honours degree, Emma – a thoughtful Northerner with lefty leanings – drifts into a dull teaching job at a comprehensive school in Wolverhampton while posh, handsome, self-centred Dex, with his mediocre 2:2 in anthropology, rockets to fame on that fledgling new media outlet, blokey, shouty late-night TV.

Do Em-and-Dex, Dex-and-Em get together? Will they live happily ever after? Is real friendship between men and women possible? Can crossing the class divide ever be good for you? If this is the up-and-coming autumn assignment for your book club, don’t worry. You don’t need to close your eyes; I’m not going to do the plot spoiler thing. But having read One Day in just under two days, smiling now and again and cheering once (oh, all right, it was on page 247, when Emma tells godawful Mr Godalming to stuff his teaching job and his extra-curricular, extra-marital slap-and-tickle and chucks her mobile phone into the river), I’d put it on a par with a glass of lukewarm tap water. It does the job and it’s not objectionable in any way, but that’s about the height of it.

Actually that's not strictly true. You could make plenty of objections to One Day. It's shot through with snide, Wasp-y socio-political assumptions – often inverted for comic effect, but that's no excuse. Its treatment of male and female characters smacks of good old-fashioned inequality and/or male-oriented wishful thinking. I mean, come on. Emma has glasses, then she doesn't – which, for a woman, is much better, obviously? Dex drinks and smokes himself silly, and thinks strip clubs are okay, and still all the girls love him – even when he grows into a chunky middle-aged chap with bad breath? Yeah, right.

ON THE PLUS SIDE, One Dayis culturally clued-in (it's prefaced by a quote from Philip Larkin, and by page six has referenced Chagall, Vermeer, Nina Simone and Samuel Beckett) and its self-conscious, send-it-up satire is often genuinely funny, beginning with student apartments and moving on to weddings, babies and the New Dad.

At the same time, it understands that making a skit of everything is Just Not Mature; one of the characters is a stand-up comedian who comes to realise that he Just Isn’t Funny, for goodness’ sake.

What baffles me is not the ubiquity of the book in polite society ( The Da Vinci Codewas once ubiquitous too, remember?) but the passionate reponses it appears to evoke. "Amazing," goes one online verdict. "Heart-wrenching, funny, real, albeit sometimes over-the-top. The author doesn't waste a word in this book; it's very character-driven, and each and every sentence seems to have purpose and feeling." Another reader "felt like I was reading about two of my best friends and I became so invested in their lives, it was hard to put the book down because I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen between them next . . . " The love-it camp also contains a number of celebrity reviewers, among them Nick Hornby ("big, absorbing, smart, fantastically readable"), Tony Parsons ("Every reader will fall in love with it. And every writer will wish they had written it") and Kate Moss ("Absolutely wonderful, moving and engaging").

Plenty of readers dislike the book just as intensely. One blogger says "dull is the perfect adjective to describe One Day". Another laments; "there is just no pay-off after enduring this depressing tale sprinkled with occasional one-liners". And a third – my personal favourite – declares; "Only the fact that I borrowed this book from Courtney kept me from throwing it against the wall." Dana, I know how you feel. Except that I didn't even feel that strongly about it. I felt, in fact, nothing at all, though I was glad that Courtney got her book back intact. I'm sure she's delighted.

Am I a literary snob? Maybe. But I can read practically anything. I wept buckets over The Secret Life of Bees. I gobbled up Bella Pollen's The Summer of the Bear. With One Day, though, there's so much self-regarding fuss over the structure of the story ("Hey! It's 1997 already . . . Wow! How did we get to 2002?") that narrative momentum doesn't stand a chance. Plus, it's hard to avoid the suspicion that the book was always a screenplay in the making. All those passing years. All those changes of hairstyle. A glance at the movie trailers confirms the suspicion, adding in changes of location. Edinburgh. London. Paris.

So if you haven't read One Dayyet, here's what I recommend. Skip it and go for the movie version instead – and get it over with in One Evening.