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** spoiler alert ** There will be spoilers...

I am no longer speaking to this book it has seriously pissed me off. It is imperialist unamerican and majorly depressing. I have done you a favor Mr Nicholls and decided not to kill myself lest it reflect poorly on your book, but you made me want to repeatedly. And yes I understand you are british and that there is something fundamentally wrong with british people that makes you uncomfortable with anyone have a remotely good day in a novel, but seriously. Honestly David I am a bit worried about you and I think it maybe a good idea for you to go see a therapist you seem intensely depressed to me and you don't want to go ending up like B.S. Johnson now do you?

Right so now that I am done ranting about cultural differences on to ranting about the book. This book basically has the plot of an american romantic comedy. Nicholls even knows this and periodically remarks on it (comparing the main characters to Harry and Sally for example). Unlike an American story it's well depressing and not a little bit, all the time. I know it is hard to imagine but this is a book about two people who are basically depressed constantly, okay I lie once Emma is happy and maybe twice Dexter is happy in a course of 20 years, and it is never super happy, just eh okay happy. They are constantly in relationships they hate with people that hate them or generally terrible at whatever they are attempting to do at that moment. Seriously this is why I am getting up in the morning so that I can be miserable once again?

This book seems to me to have two options for trajectories:
The American: They get together and everyone lives happily ever after.
The british: they stay friends but they never seem to slow down long enough to get together.

The second option feels like the direction the book is going for a full 3 hundred pages. Dexter even at one point says something along these lines to Emma. And to be completely honest I was okay with that. I understand the idea that some people just can't slow down enough to make a relationship work. I understand that regardless of how much Emma and Dexter love each other, which is evident in the book, that sometimes things just don't manage to fall into place. This doesn't mean that they don't love each other enough or that there is something wrong with them, it simply means that circumstances are simply unable to create a world in which people like Emma and Dexter end up together. Perhaps they care to much, perhaps in the end we all settle. With passion comes disease and argument, and a relationship of love can never be quite as perfect as a relationship of compromise. Of Dexter marrying someone else and agreeing to become a just good enough husband, of Emma settling for a man who loves her whom she can't manage to change quite enough to love him back. This is where I thought the book was going to go. Perhaps the book still ends up here in a terribly horrendous way but first...

The book goes american on us. They manage to get together, and just in time, whew almost missed that whole biological clock thing, and yes circumstances could be better. I mean that idiot Dexter has a kid that truly belongs to someone else and he has been a loser and a drunk for the better part of 40 years, but at least it finally happens. And Emma fixes him. Yay for an american happy ending.

But wait on their two year anniversary "Emma Morley dies" and I am not kidding that is the amount of play it gets in the book. She thinks she is going to be late meeting dexter to look at a house and she dies. This is where the book and I began our grudge map. I did not wait 350 pages for something good to finally happen so that people could suddenly get killed off. And Dexter becomes a bad person again, but he gets over it and is friends with his ex wife again and dating the manager of his shop, um can you say incest? Serious at least date someone who your wife wasn't making jokes about you cheating on her with.

So seriously David I am worried about you if these are your introjects of the world, please email me I will help you find a good therapist.