The Brexit Romance: Finding Love in Irreconcilable Times – The New York Times

A LOVERS DISCOURSEBy Xiaolu Guo

JUST LIKE YOUBy Nick Hornby

Not even the most starry-eyed Europhile would claim that the relationship between Britain and the European Union was ever a love match. But somehow, for over 40 years, they held it together, like a pair of bickering partners who fight bitterly but are still in it for the long haul. Brexit, of course, changed everything.

Two new novels reflect on the meaning of this still-unfolding breakup. They each dramatize a love affair set against the backdrop of Brexit, using the most universal and gratifying human experience to illuminate one of the most arcane and incomprehensible.

Helpfully, the unnamed narrator of Xiaolu Guos novel A Lovers Discourse is an anthropologist. Shes able to cast her ethnographic eye over the mystifying natives and try to make sense of their impenetrable customs in this case, the inhabitants of 21st-century Britain and their disagreements over Europe.

The book reverses the common theme of a perplexed Westerner baffled by the habits and rituals of an Asian country. Transplanted to London, the Chinese-born narrator struggles with the citys transport system, tries to find Brexit in her dictionary and wonders if London Wall is anything like the Great Wall of China. (In fact, its a largely notional vestige of the citys Roman boundary).

Our heroine meets a half-Australian, half-German landscape architect, and a love affair begins. They move passionately and possibly rashly through the early stages of romance to set up home in a very particular corner of London: its floating subculture of itinerant narrow-boat dwellers.

Guo is an unsparing noticer. She paints a vivid but unflattering portrait of her new dwelling in her adopted country: I stared at the canal. This was the English water, cold, gray and full of deadly discharge. Just a few ducks floating by, with their feet trapped in plastic shopping bags.

The truthfulness and accuracy of Guos language gives the book mischief and energy. There are shades of Lydia Davis in her carefully etched sentences as she details the ups and downs of the relationship without sentimentality. Once we got onto the bed, I no longer felt horny, Guo writes. The bed was cold, the duvet heavy. I was distracted by a patch of bird poo, dried on the bedside window. But we made love.

What propels the book forward is in part the sense of suspense that hangs over the nascent relationship: Has our heroine made an enormous mistake getting together with an itchy-footed boat lover? But theres also something compelling about the breadth of the world the narrator inhabits. The book moves briskly from the canals of North London to Scotland, Australia, Germany and China. Along the way, its capacious enough to touch on moments of real darkness, while somehow managing to be mordant, funny and, ultimately, life-affirming.

The English novelist Nick Hornbys best-selling books are rooted in an engaging and funny literary persona. Over the years, his writing has anatomized commitment and relationships with a sharp eye for foibles especially male ones. In his ninth work of fiction, Just Like You, he focuses on a pair of mismatched lovers: Lucy, a 42-year-old English teacher, and Joseph, the 22-year-old assistant in the butchers shop where she buys meat for her two young sons.

Stuck for child care and perhaps taken by Josephs good looks Lucy asks Joseph to babysit for her. This relationship deepens when he fends off her drunken ex-husband and forms a bond with her soccer-mad sons. It soon becomes clear that despite the age gap, theres a sexual spark between the two main characters.

Were in familiar territory for the author: a North London setting, amiable comedy and nebbishy internal monologues about the awkwardness of social interactions. He found himself wondering whether he would ever go to the cinema with Lucy, Hornby writes. It was completely possible, of course, in the sense that very small ambitions can be achieved quite easily, if one can be bothered. He could just ask her, maybe after a couple more babysitting sessions.

However, age is not the only obstacle. Theres another difference tiptoed around in the novels promotional copy in a way that suggests nervousness, at least on the part of the publisher: Josephs of a different class, a different culture and a different generation. Different culture here means that Joseph is Black and Lucy is white.

How do two people from such different backgrounds manage to transcend their differences? Without too much difficulty, it turns out. As we slip between their viewpoints, Lucy worries about meeting Josephs mother and Joseph frets about introducing Lucy to his friends, but the actual relationship progresses with enviable ease. Josephs smart, wise beyond his years, a natural with the kids. The sexual side of things gets underway smoothly: He learned quickly and within a few days or nights or dates or whatever they had entered a Golden Age. No bird poo or asynchronous libidos here. Even their inevitable setbacks are handled with dignity.

In fact, theres no great sense of jeopardy at all, beyond the readers vague anxiety over whether Britains most genial living novelist is going to get canceled by an indignant Twitter mob for straying out of his lane.

The charm of Hornbys previous books has been the way they balance middlebrow uplift with enough emotional truth to make the fantasy feel grounded. Here, theres something underimagined about the two main characters. Tackling the intractable subjects of race and Brexit, the author seems constrained to make Lucy and Joseph exemplary and consequently rather bland.

Though theres a lot of dialogue internal and external were not permitted to see much. It feels as if the leads have yet to be cast and the fictional world awaits the vision of a director. The characters thoughts linger on innocuous subjects and hurry past potentially awkward ones. The sex is obliquely described and the question of whether Lucy is fetishizing her handsome young Black partner is raised for an instant, then dashed. Shes able to recognize the tendency in her friend: Would Emma be licking her lips if he were a handsome young white butchers assistant? she wonders. But the thought an intriguing one is swiftly dispelled, too uncomfortable for the books PG-certificate world.

The novel saves its ridicule for cartoonish minor characters and predictable targets: pretentious art, middle-aged white novelists, elderly theatergoers, racist police officers, libidinous middle-aged women. While its never a disagreeable book, its hampered by a flatness that comes from our feeling that the author has deliberately wired things so the conflict will never rise above a certain voltage. And in the fraught times in which the novel has arrived, its bonhomie comes off as strained and false.

Both A Lovers Discourse and Just Like You suggest that in a time of struggle between seemingly irreconcilable opposites, who hold each others differences to be moral failings, it might be instructive to consider how humans overcome obstacles in other types of relationships.

Guo gives her characters scope to live and suffer, so her books final affirmation has a hard-won quality that carries weight. But, in the end, the child-proofed world of Just Like You cant tell us much about difficult negotiations. Conflict-averse, it seems to endorse Josephs approach to the Brexit referendum: Check all the boxes so no one has a reason to dislike you.

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The Brexit Romance: Finding Love in Irreconcilable Times - The New York Times