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Just Like You

Review

Just Like You

Nick Hornby’s many fans pretty much know what to expect when they pick up a new novel by the author of HIGH FIDELITY and ABOUT A BOY. And it’s safe to say that those readers won’t be disappointed when they read JUST LIKE YOU, the amiable story of a contemporary love affair between two lovers about as mismatched as any pair could be.

A North London butcher shop in the spring of 2016 isn’t the most likely setting for romance to blossom. But that’s where the spark is lit for 22-year-old Joseph, a university dropout who works there part-time when he’s not employed at a local leisure center and a couple of other odd jobs, or polishing the D.J. mix he hopes will land him a club booking, and Lucy, a secondary school English teacher with two young sons who happens to be two decades his senior. The fact that Joseph is Black and Lucy white only makes their attraction more intriguing.

Considering his age, Joseph’s gig-based livelihood and relative aimlessness, “stuck living a life that didn’t seem to count for much, somewhere halfway between childhood and whatever permanent adulthood might bring,” aren’t surprising, but Lucy is dealing with her own emotional challenge --- the breakup of her marriage to her substance-abusing husband. After Joseph begins babysitting for Lucy’s boys, who are instantly attracted to him, their relationship quickly evolves --- against the odds --- into something much more.

"Hornby has a knack for creating brisk and realistic exchanges between his principal characters that keep the novel bubbling along at an agreeable pace. He also seasons the story with his well-honed wit."

The two lovers are refreshingly self-aware as they navigate the journey into romance. Lucy, surprisingly fulfilled in her relationship with a young man she considers “a wonky table, a glass skylight, thin ice,” understands that “the trouble with life was that you only traveled in one direction,” recognizing the poignant reality of the looming time when Joseph is likely to want his own children, and the near impossibility of that ever occurring in their pairing. For Joseph, who acknowledges “the weird thing about being his age was that you spent half your time dreaming about what might happen to you, and the other half trying not to think about it,” the initial attraction is clearly sexual, but when he thinks of Lucy he realizes “the heat seemed to intensify the more you got to know her.”

Hornby has a knack for creating brisk and realistic exchanges between his principal characters that keep the novel bubbling along at an agreeable pace. He also seasons the story with his well-honed wit. It’s displayed, for example, in the account of Joseph’s date with a girl named Jaz to see a film entitled Satan’s Butcher, where he applies insights gained from selling meat to muse on the killer’s inept technique in carving up his victims, and in the recording studio where Joseph brings Jaz to record the vocal track for his mix. She balks at his proposed lyrics --- an extended metaphor involving female empowerment and cars --- and instead proposes to sing about oral sex or Brexit.

Though it doesn’t exactly loom over the story, malaise about the approaching vote on Britain’s relationship to the European Union is palpable. Lucy, disgusted with the “hypocrites, bullies, and racists” behind the initiative, is firmly in the “stay” camp, while Joseph, whose parents both plan to vote “leave,” chooses a unique way to express his ambivalence about the referendum. In a brief epilogue from the spring of 2019, he concludes that the movement “seemed to have floated clear of its details. It was now like a religion,” where there were “those who believed and those who didn’t and there were nutters on both sides, marching and shouting.”

Beyond the expected tensions that would arise from the characters’ age differential, which Hornby dramatizes in scenes of a dinner party with Lucy’s friends and a visit to a club with Joseph’s, he doesn’t place them under much pressure. Even an incident involving one of Lucy’s neighbors, who calls the police when he suspects that Joseph might be an intruder, feels relatively benign. Hornby creates some modest obstacles for his protagonists --- Joseph’s roving eye the most problematic and the objections of the pair’s parents the most predictable --- but consistent with the novel’s geniality, they’re little more than speed bumps.

All this leaves one wishing for a story in which a little more seemed at stake. Still, because Lucy and Joseph are such a likable pair, most readers will find themselves rooting for a happy ending to this modern fairy tale.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg on September 30, 2020

Just Like You
by Nick Hornby

  • Publication Date: September 28, 2021
  • Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction
  • Paperback: 384 pages
  • Publisher: Riverhead Books
  • ISBN-10: 0593191390
  • ISBN-13: 9780593191392