One Day

It rarely happens that I see a movie trailer and want to buy the book for it, but that's exactly what happened for One Day. I mean, isn't this the cutest trailer? (It might have something to do with the fact that they play my new favorite song, Good Life, in it...) So my friend Lucy bought the book, having had the same reaction as I did to the trailer. And while we were in Boston last week, I read it.

Basically, Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew met at university in the 1980s, and the book follows their relationship, for one day each year. You get snapshots of Dexter and Emma through the years, through what they each are going through, how they keep in touch with each other, how they change, where they end up. I expected cute fluff, a sweet friendship and eventual "everyone-but-us-saw-it" romance. But that was not what I got.

I got unlikeable main characters. Emma, until maybe the last 3 chapters, is complaining, bitter, self-pitying, self-concious, and sarcastic. She's clever, certainly, but she spends nearly the whole book unhappy, complaining to herself, and suffering through her boring life. Really, the only interesting thing in her life is Dexter, who, by the way, I don't think was sober in the entire book. He literally spends his life drinking, doing drugs, social climbing, all the while blind to his shallowness and mistakes. He's too cocky, too carefree and childish to ever be likeable. So while these two people have an enduring and close friendship, I really didn't like them enough to want them to be happy.

I also got a long, dragged out friendship, with relatively little change. As I mentioned before, Dexter spends nearly the whole book drunk or high or both, and so his portions of the story are all the same: he feels empty, he's half ashamed, half elated to be living the high life. He misses Emma. And Emma, though she travels around, never really progresses in her character enough to make her story change. Though different events occur, she remains static, giving the impression that no time has passed. Actually, by the end, I felt as if neither person was much different or changed than in the beginning.

I got some clever dialogue- in particular, Emma and Dexter's strict "no Scrabble" rule cracks me up. Their banter is cute and amusing, perhaps the only light part of the book. It's also all we're meant to base their relationship on, so it had better be clever, right? And in the classic When Harry Met Sally way, the flirty dialogue shows that Emma and Dexter are never truly just friends; the pair can't feel platonically towards each other, no matter how hard they try and convince us otherwise. This was slightly frustrating, as the majority of the book neither of them admitted this, insisting they weren't attracted to each other outwardly. That gets a little tiring after a couple hundred pages...

Finally, I got an example of how empty relentless partying and life without purpose is. Though Emma is successful eventually, and Dexter too, they don't ever feel fulfilled. They are continually looking for more in their lives. It's such a telling example of the emptiness of a life without purpose; of the "God shaped hole" in everyone's life. Without any higher calling, Emma and Dexter's lives were empty, each driven to despair in the face of a meaningless existence. In being part of restorative work in God's kingdom, I have a higher purpose and calling for my life. I know that what I do is important to the kingdom work. So I don't have to live my life empty, the way Emma and Dexter do. Because at the mini-twist ending, Emma and Dexter don't seem much happier than they were to begin with, more fulfilled or content. And that leaves the book feeling incomplete.