The Elephant in the Room is Thomas Hardy

    "The elephant in the room is Thomas Hardy," is a quote from Nick Hornby's novel, Just Like You, (Viking, 2020) which I am reading. Like most of Hornby's  novels, it is funny and insightful about the human condition.

    The novel centres on Lucy, the principal of an elementary school in a disadvantaged part of London (England). She is in her early forties, separated, the mother of two school aged boys, and in  love with a man half her age who is juggling several different jobs to make ends meet.  At one stage in their relationship, the man, Joseph,  finds a girlfriend, Hanna, who seems on the surface to be more suited to him. Still, he intends to go to a country cottage in Thomas Hardy country to meet up with the school principal and her two sons, and because he doesn't clarify the nature of his relationship with Lucy, the girlfriend invites herself along.  En route, he divulges that he has been having an affair with Lucy.

    Lucy is a kind person, skilled in getting along with others whatever the circumstances, and on learning that Hanna loves Thomas Hardy, she proposes a visit to  his house, Max Gate, an historic site. The males of the group don't want to come along, so the two women go together. In the car, the teacher asks, "Who got you interested in Hardy?" and at the very same moment, the younger woman says, "Joseph told me about your thing."  They laugh, and Lucy says, "Different subjects. I don't think Thomas Hardy can ever be an elephant in the room."  

   Hanna says, "That would be a good writing exercise. 'Write a story in which one character has to say, at some point, 'The elephant in the room here is Thomas Hardy.' " The teacher says she'll try it at her school.

    What a challenge! As a writer, I feel it a duty to do that writing exercise, and have been making notes for a story in which some character calls Hardy the elephant in the room.

    In Just Like You, there are three elephants in the room - age, class and race. Nick Hornby starts with the following quote from Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy.

    "Were we to evaluate people, mot only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupation and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and their sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there could be no classes. Who would be able to say the scientist was superior to the porter with admirable qualities as a father; the civil servant with unusual skill at gaining prizes to the lorry driver with unusual skill at growing roses?"