The One
The One
By John Marrs
In my efforts to keep up with what all the young, cool people are reading these days, I occasionally look at social media reels to see if there's a book that sounds interesting. Having heard people rave about The One by John Marrs on many of them, I decided to make it my next adventure into fiction. And now having just finished reading it, I'm glad I took the time for it.
This book is terrific, but I'm not quite convinced that it's terrific for the reasons I feel a book should be considered terrific. Marrs hits the reader head-on from the first page with a unique concept--people can now use swabs of their DNA saliva to determine their perfect love match. And of course, that's accompanied by all the crazy shit opening that can of worms can lead to.
He hits the reader with a quick beginning by using multi-genre with a screenshot of Match Your DNA's homepage and drags the reader into the lives of five separate people as they utilize the service. Marrs both starts and maintains a fast pacing throughout the novel that keeps the reader invested; I actually read it in 3 days because it kept my attention.
But while Marrs's pace is a great strength, it also happens to be his tragic downfall, as well. Having read about Marrs after finishing the book, I wasn't that surprised to find that Marrs previously worked as a reporter because all of his chapters are incredibly short and read more like fast-paced online information dumps than carefully paced fiction.
The One moves so quickly that, while I wanted to truly feel for each of the protagonists he created, I had difficulty believing they were actual people and having sympathy for most of them. The writer chose to flood many of the sections for characterization and relationship dynamics with quick pop culture references that made his characters seem more like caricatures instead of actual people. Backstories given in dialogue sometimes without context. In at least one instance, Marrs even had a contradiction with one of his character's familial background within a span of two paragraphs.
His character relationships tried so desperately to be different from the other points of view that a lot of their fundamentals read almost the same. While I loved the concept (especially because parts of it reminded me of a short story I wrote), I did not love most of the characters despite really wanting to.
And while Marrs added plenty of excitement with twists and turns in almost every chapter to keep the reader going, anyone who has ever had bad interactions with dating in the 2020’s could predict what was going to happen 80% of the time. With the frequency of such twists, it seemed like Marrs struggled with properly laying out the concealed bread crumbs to give the reader a fair advantage to make some of his twists feel well-deserved. Some of them towards the last quarter of the novel actually felt like dirty tricks played on the reader, and thanks to Marrs's desire to give most of his chapters a cliff hanger, some of them read like borderline melodrama. That feeling was partly reinforced by Marrs's carefully chosen pattern to his structure--choosing to give every character a chapter in the exact same order, regardless of whether or not there was much to report on to the reader at that current moment.
Between the carefully calculated and orchestrated plot structure and the whirlwind of pacing throughout the novel, the overall effect was that, while The One had some brilliantly crafted one or two line thematic passages sprinkled within the text and a seriously awesome story to be told, it didn't pack nearly the punch that separates a terrific novel from a truly spectacular novel.
I think if Marrs had taken the time to ease his stronghold on the narration and provided readers with just a tiny bit more time to get to know both his characters and the theme unfolding in real-time, The One could have been a truly powerful and gut-wrenching novel instead of a fun beach read. I'd recommend this novel to any writer who is looking for an exercise in what can cripple a novel and generally any person who wants to feel glad they're single.