Nicholas Sparks

I picked up a Nicholas Sparks some months ago, when I was on holiday in America.  And it inspired me.  Since then I’ve read several more of his books, and have come to the conclusion that he’s a hit and miss writer.

But there’s something very likable about his books and he comes across as a man of warmth and feeling and I enjoy his work even if it is not “great literature!”  The first book I read was “Dear John”, a novel about a young man from a poor background, in the South, (like most of Sparks’ heroes).  He lives alone with his father, who is not close to him, and is not doing well at school or showing any ambition.  Then after a few years, he goes into the Army and finds a purpose in life that he hadn’t had before. He then meets a young woman, Savannah, from a different background, who is at college and is a Christian.  He falls in love with her, but the novel is about the difficulties of maintaining a relationship when one of the partners is in the military.  John means to leave the army after his hitch is up, and marry Savannah, but “9/11” intervenes. After the terrorist attack, he -like many others -ends up re enlisting and that puts a major strain on his girlfriend. She and John don’t have much time to spend together and he begins to feel uneasy with her college friends.  They quarrel at times and then when he is serving abroad, she writes to him to say she wants to break off the relationship. 

John returns to America, later, because his father is very ill. His father dies, and he goes to see Savannah who is now married to a friend of hers called Tim.  Tim’s younger brother is autistic and because of this, Savannah wanted to run a ranch for children with similar problems. They set one up then, Tim became ill with cancer and is dying.  Savannah takes him to see her husband.  John makes a big sacrifice to try to save Tim’s life and protect Savannah’s marriage.

I like this ending, as while it is not “happy ever after”, it shows that love can make things better and that real love may demands a sacrifice. And that not all love affairs have a happy ending. 

In some of Sparks’ other works, he ends with something even sadder than a near death of a character, and indeed I have to say that at times he seems to be searching the medical dictionary for illnesses to make his characters unhappy.

But in Dear John, I enjoy the problem and the resolution. I think that in his later books perhaps Sparks is under pressure to produce regularly and finds it harder to come up with plots.   But I enjoy Dear John because it seems realistic in its looking at the differences between the 2 characters  - John as someone to whom the army was important because it had provided him with a purpose, and Savannah who was more privileged and interested in intellectual matters.   She is young and inexperienced and it’s understandable that she might be attracted to John but not feel able to cope with a long distance relationship for years to come.
I’ve tried not to put too many spoilers in this!