I don’t think I’ve read Nick Horby since I was 19, and that was for a college lit course in which we were assigned About a Boy. I remember nothing other than we also watched the movie starring Hugh Grant, back when Hugh Grant was a thing. I know Horby is famous, though, so I had no quibbles about purchasing the novella State of the Union: A Marriage in Ten Parts at the $1 library sale. 

The plot is quite simple. Tom and Louise have been married for years and have two children, but when Tom stopped having sex with Louise, she had a brief affair. The novella reads more like a play, completely set in a bar and the street outside. Each section begins with Louise and Tom entering the bar, what they’re wearing, where they sit. Really truly, set up like a play. The rest of the section continues almost entirely in dialogue. It’s a play, Nick Horby! You’re not tricking me!

Okay, we can call it a novella. Anyway, the dialogue shines, giving readers insight into the complicated nature of relationships. I don’t mean it in a flippant way, because all relationships are complicated. My god, the nuance. Instead, Hornby highlights the ways in which we want many things to be true at the same time. When Tom tries to change himself to be more desirable to Louise, she finds him creepy. He’s not trying enough, he’s trying too hard, he’s not trying like himself, etc.

Louise isn’t the villain here; Tom doesn’t really want to do therapy. In a later section when they finally start having sex again and she questions its validity (was the sex too good, meaning he was performing as if she were someone else?!), he says, “Don’t start on the sex. Leave it alone. We’re having it. Don’t knock it. It’s my only accomplishment of the year.”

The origin of the marital issues is not sex, but on the surface, that seems to be the problem. One conversation asks what the importance of sex in a marriage is:

“But take the sex away, and all you’re doing is . . . sharing a house with some bloke who moans a lot and pokes fun at my bedtime reading habits. I mean, what’s he even doing in bed with me?”

“I’m just trying to encourage you to branch out. There can’t be that many Scandinavian women left to kill, surely?”

“Do you understand? Sex is the thing that separates you from everyone else in my life.”

“Nearly everyone, anyway.”

At the end, Tom makes a dig at Louise for her affair, so while we’re laughing as readers, the characters are taking this seriously, which makes for a juxtaposition I did not expect and truly enjoyed. You have to ask yourself why some marriages work while others just limp along. When Louise admits that she’s been recording their therapy sessions and then re-listens to them when she goes on a walk, Tom is astounded, not believing he gave her consent to do that. And why would she relisten to them? He asks, “Like a BBC radio drama sort of thing?” She replies, “Yeah. Except there are some credibility gaps. Like, wow, these two people would never get together in real life.”

We don’t know if Tom and Louise make it or not, and that’s not the point. Hornby gives us a snapshot of a broken marriage that has a lot of heart in it, and those pre-therapy pints and the pub across the street are deeply engaging and darkly funny. Go ahead and get this one — you’ll finish it in a couple of hours.