Book Review

Just Like You by Nick Hornby

Terrell Tebbetts has taught English at Lyon College for over 50 years.

British novelist Nick Hornby has a large following on both sides of the Atlantic among readers of his fiction and among movie-goers who’ve enjoyed the films made from his novels About a Boy and High Fidelity and his memoir Fever Pitch.

He has won that following in part because of his challenges to modern stereotypes. In About a Boy, for example, he subtly took on the radical feminist claim that males are essentially self-indulgent and predatory and females are essentially nurturing: he portrays Will Freeman, who fits the stereotype at the beginning, but then he adds another male, a boy, through whom Will matures into a nurturer, a person much better than a merely “free man.”

Hornby has also won readers by giving them characters who change through the course of his novels. Will Freeman is an early example, and an even earlier one is Rob Gordon in High Fidelity, another “free man” who comes to acknowledge that “I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have sh*t for brains.”

If readers come to Hornby for such qualities in his new novel, Just Like You (Riverhead Books, 2020), he will disappoint them. Instead of challenging modern stereotypes, he simply employs them in this flat novel in which characters never change.

He gives readers a sexually liberated woman, Lucy, as one of his two central characters, 42-year old white divorcee with two school-age sons (ages 9 and 11) who heads the English department at a London high school.

He adds a single 25-year-old black man, Joseph, who has not attended university and has no career yet, though he wants to become a DJ. However, he does work steadily at several jobs—including as a clerk at a neighborhood butcher shop whose customers sometimes ask him to babysit.

Lucy and Joseph meet at the shop, they’re attracted to each other, she asks him to babysit, her sons love him because he is expert at all their video games, and, predictably, Lucy and Joseph become lovers.

In the process Hornby seems to endorse stereotypes beloved by the class Lucy represents, the same college-educated secular liberals Hornby has challenged elsewhere. But here he offers no challenge to assumptions such as

Children sail through their parents’ divorces totally unaffected.

Children have no issues with new men entering their divorced mothers’ lives.

A liberated middle-aged woman can have a happy, long-lasting relationship with a trophy partner.

Has Hornby seen the studies on the children of divorce? Where in this novel is the self-blame some children experience? Where is their anger at and alienation?

How can Hornby never even hint that trophy relationships exploit the younger partner and uncommitted relationships create anxiety and fear of abandonment?

Hornby gives readers flat, unchanging characters who never question or change their ideas or behaviors. They clearly need to, as their relationship has disturbing psychological overtones.

Lucy’s attraction to a man young enough to be her son and who enjoys the games and sports her sons enjoy has incestuous implications. When fathers go absent in families, elder sons sometimes begin fulfilling the role left vacant, becoming “little fathers,” quasi-partners of their mothers.

Yet even when Lucy’s high-school students whisper that her live-in lover is barely out of school and one tells her in passing that he is “not interested,” Lucy never questions whether her attraction to Joseph is a displacement of her attraction to her elder son.

Joseph’s attraction to a woman who is the same age as his mother has its own incestuous implications. Joseph’s father abandoned the family, and Joseph still lives at home with his mother. Lucy knows Joseph’s mother is her age and worries about it, but only because she fears being a motherly age will make her less attractive to Joseph, not because she suspects Joseph’s attraction to her is a displacement of his attraction to his mother.

What a comedown from Hornby’s earlier novels in which characters do suffer from their blindnesses and mistakes and mature into fuller human beings. This novel is fantasy fiction. N

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