STATE OF THE UNION

An unhappy couple walks into a bar….

“This would make a good play,” one may think while
reading Hornby’s (Funny Girl, 2015, etc.) latest—if one doesn’t know
that it has already been dramatically produced for television. In addition to
being a little book with 10 short chapters, State of the Union is
also a 10-part series of 10-minute episodes with Rosamund Pike and Chris
O’Dowd, to be released on SundanceTV the day before publication. Consisting
almost entirely of witty repartee, the slim volume reads more
like a script than a novel. In both the book and the series, Tom and Louise, a couple, meet at a pub across the street from their marriage
counselor’s office each week before their appointment. Each week he (an
unemployed music critic) has a pint and works the Guardian’s cryptic crossword and she (a gerontologist)
has a glass of white wine. Once set up with their drinks, they banter either
irritably or companionably about black-and-white films, Brexit, and their
relationship. “It’s a long and complicated road that has led us here.
Don’t you think?” says Louise. “Well. It depends which way you look
at it. There’s the long and complicated, and then there’s…as the crow flies,”
says Tom. “Talk me through the route your crow flies,” Louise says.
“You slept with someone else, and here we are,” says Tom. Though between Week 4 and Week 5, Tom
moves out of the family home and into “a squat with three media studies students,”
he never goes so far as to buy his own copy of the newspaper, preferring to
print the crossword off the website. Unlike another couple they often watch
coming out of the appointment right before theirs, Tom and Louise have hope,
right?

Leaves you eager to watch the show. Wait—do you think that
was the idea?