Divorced, Disheveled and Hiking Toward Love

fiction

In David Nicholls’s “You Are Here,” a boggy trek through the English countryside becomes an unlikely impetus for midlife romance.

Paul Rudnick is the author of “Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style.”

YOU ARE HERE, by David Nicholls

David Nicholls’s captivating new novel takes place almost entirely during a guided, days-long walk through the English countryside, past perilous crags, moors and villages with names like Buttermere, Honister Pass and Bolton-on-Swale. In lesser hands, “You Are Here” might be a literal slog, but Nicholls has fashioned an ideal structure for an affectingly hard-won romance, a genre he has honed as the author of many best sellers, including the much loved and repeatedly adapted “One Day.”

Here, a sightseeing, exercise-anticipating group — “four single people, a married couple, a teenager” — is soon winnowed, thanks to the punishing rain and boot-sucking mud, to just two: Michael Bradshaw, a geography teacher, and Marnie Walsh, a freelance copy editor, both barely recovered from divorces.

Michael, while morosely pining for his ex, still becomes a sturdy and slyly amusing authority figure, his journey “the kind of obsessive project that overtakes men in the middle of life.” He believes that “stepping outside transformed loneliness into solitude,” and his recently grown beard gives him the look, according to Marnie, of “someone who’d spent a year filming puffins in the Hebrides.” While rarely self-pitying, Michael is flailing amid the debris of a loving marriage gone sour and the aftershocks of a random act of street violence.

Marnie is a compulsively witty, winningly cranky near-agoraphobe. While the novel isn’t set during the coronavirus pandemic, those years of enforced isolation and working from home inform the narrative, as Michael and Marnie crawl out from their respective, maybe-too-comfortable burrows. Marnie grew up so obsessed with books that “my parents actually told me to read less.” She admits that she sometimes wished she were an orphan, although “only for the narrative possibilities.”

After splitting from a shallow and unappreciative husband who resembled “the least popular member of a boy band,” Marnie, whose career can be pursued entirely on her laptop, has become estranged from coupled friends and their growing families. She’s someone addicted to “the pleasure of the canceled plan” — not out of envy or spite, but a hermit’s discomfort.

Pushing herself to turn outward, she prepares for the group trek by purchasing “socks of an unimaginable complexity, based on a design by NASA, and a red woolly beanie because wasn’t 95 percent of body heat lost through the head? She bought thermals in case of snow, sunblock in case of sun, she bought maps and a clear waterproof pouch for the maps, and a rucksack with a pocket for the map pouch plus the capacity to carry 40 liters of clothing, though she struggled to imagine what 40 liters of clothing would look like.” In his pack, the more experienced Michael has a single “night-life shirt” and one pair of underwear, which he scrubs in bathroom sinks and leaves on radiators to dry overnight.

Both protagonists are prickly, smart and desperately yearning, but utterly guarded for understandably good reasons. As in the best romances, we cherish Michael’s and Marnie’s difficult personalities, and relish the unlikely process that might bring them together.

Their walk provides a perfect backdrop for conversations that begin with banter and deepen into confession, always enlivened with humor and factoids about limestone outcroppings that should be tedious but also resonate and entertain. Over the course of a week, Marnie keeps plotting escape, via taxi and train, but continues to postpone these arrangements to spend another few knee-punishing, downpour-drenched hours with Michael, who inwardly delights in every delay. They book their nights at a series of hotels, bed-and-breakfasts and linoleum-infested rooms above pubs, the sort of blandly depressing lodgings where “you might stay the night before a relative’s funeral.”

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