The 16-year-old hero of David Nicholls’s fifth novel is ostensibly Everyboy. It is June 1997, the last day at dreary Merton Grange and, having flunked his exams, Charlie Lewis attends the leaving disco — all dry ice, vomit and snogging, laced with Cointreau and disinfectant. An infinity looms of bloated summer days, with only a part-time, underpaid garage job as distraction. Home is a small southern English Everytown, neither city, suburb nor rural village, with Dog Shit Park and Murder Wood ‘where porn yellowed beneath the brambles’. Worse, Charlie’s parents have separated, and he is stranded with his depressed, boozy, bankrupt father, eating cold curry from takeaway foil containers.
An unglamorous atmosphere is familiar Nicholls territory: his first novel, Starter for Ten, starred a skinny, spotty, insecure student; the Booker long-listed Us featured a dull middle-aged husband whose marriage is coming apart; and Understudy depicted the miseries at the grubby bottom of the acting pool. But ‘something’s gotta give’, and Nicholls pulls a charmingly redemptive rabbit out of the drab hat.
Even in this parched, middle-England wilderness, love may blossom in just as passionate and meaningful a way as experienced by Shakespeare’s archetypal teenage lovers. Charlie is pulled into acting Ben-volio in an amateur theatre production, after falling for Fran, who is playing Juliet. The director appreciates the youth’s ‘faceless, milk-and-water quality’, but he explains to the troupe that ‘although the text is called Romeo and Juliet, it’s really about everyone in this world. We’ve all got these great passions, these amazing private stories. There is no such thing as a minor character.’
Charlie’s metamorphosis is dramatic. Through love, Shakespeare’s poetry and theatrical collaboration, the sad, vulnerable boy becomes the star of his own life. The planets align, he loses his virginity and the novel starts to soar with joy and tenderness.Nonetheless,
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