Just Like You review Nick Hornby tackles race, romance and Brexit

Love blossoms between a young black man and a middle-aged white mother in Hornby’s assured, if cosy, new novel

In this age of anxiety about cultural appropriation and suchlike, kudos to Nick Hornby’s bold move in Just Like You. He narrates one half of it from the point of view of a working-class black man in his early 20s and the other half from the point of view of a 42-year-old middle-class white mother. And, what’s more, he makes a social comedy of the two of them falling in love, one that gently dramatises their differences of class, race and generation.

Joseph is broke and a bit aimless. He lives with his God-fearing old mum, coaches football in his spare time and works in a north London butcher’s shop while nursing dreams of making it big as a DJ. One of his regular customers is Lucy, head of English at a local school, mother of two boys and separated from Paul.

Paul was a suboptimal husband: “Paul had spent all their money. Paul had ruined too many birthdays. Paul had called her a bitch and a cunt too many times. Paul had hit a Deliveroo driver and bought cocaine and dealers into the house where her children lived.”

Lucy asks Joseph to babysit one evening (she’s going out to a dinner party where she’s to be match-made with a successful novelist whose ripe self-regard is nicely sent up), an occasional job turns into a flirtation and, to both their surprise, to something more. But as all the great writers of romance have known, love between two people also exists in a wider social world. The bubble in which Lucy and Joseph’s affair begins – sitting at home having sex and watching The Sopranos – can’t stay a bubble forever if the relationship is to continue.

Hornby makes hay with all this. Joseph’s mother is none too keen on his dating a woman close to her own age and Joseph is none too keen on the two women meeting; Lucy cringes as her friends (“graphic designers… publishers and independent film-makers”) patronise her new boyfriend; a neighbour calls the cops on the black youth he sees loitering on Lucy’s doorstep late at night; Joseph is mortified when he plays Lucy his new track and she toe-taps along to it like an encouraging mum. Both are intensely sensitive to any sign that the other is conscious of what divides them. Lucy worries about her ageing body; Joseph is quick to pick up on any remark Lucy makes that suggests she’s conscious of his race.

By setting most of Just Like You in 2016, what’s more, Hornby stirs in that great exposer of fissures in class, race and generation: the Brexit referendum. Lucy’s social circle consists of people for whom voting Leave is inconceivable, possibly evil and certainly racist, but her school staffroom is more divided. Joseph is candid about not being sure on the issue (“I thought you wanted us all to be British. Just because we’re black doesn’t mean we want to stay part of Europe. Half those countries are more racist than anyone here”) and his father, a scaffolder, becomes a fervent Leaver. In the end, Joseph scandalises Lucy by revealing he ticked both boxes on the ballot paper, which really does show a class and generational divide.

Hornby is surefooted around all these issues, amiable and forgiving. On Brexit, he has Lucy decide: “The referendum was giving groups of people who didn’t like each other, or at least failed to comprehend each other, an opportunity to fight.” Does he tell us much that we don’t already know or think we don’t already know? On this I’m not sure. Just Like You – as a comedy of class difference and of the soft racism of bien-pensant liberals – invites comparison with Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age and seems to me to lack some of that novel’s sharpness. I don’t think there’s much in here to challenge or discomfit.

But why should there be? It is frequently funny, consistently engaging and it’s not primarily a sociological treatise or a satire: it’s a love story. It may not have fire in its belly, but it has great warmth in its heart.

Just Like You by Nick Hornby is published by Viking (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15

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