Review: The Four Year Hitch by Don Cox

A heartwarming novel that plays with narrative stereotypes about love and happy endings, The Four Year Hitch by Don Cox is an affecting work of romantic contemporary fiction. Although the main characters are clearly destined to be together, circumstances and individual mistakes keep them apart for a long time, making this tender piece of fiction feel as romantic as rooted in reality.

Joshua and Julie have been best friends since they were seven years old. They know everything about each other, all the little quirks, dreams, and secrets, starting from their big life aspirations all the way down to how they like tuna sandwiches. Despite them being so close, they are not on the same page when it comes to emotions.

Joshua is the first one to identify that what he feels for Julie is beyond friendship – something much much deeper that he can only call love – while Julie, bound up in the many differences between them, insists on looking everywhere else for the “right man.” When she meets Dylan and prepares to marry him, her friendship with Joshua abruptly ends.

It is by picking up a magazine that they are both in for a shock sometime later – a writer took inspiration from their love and published a story in a well-known magazine, a very real occurrence, as this novel is dubbed the sequel to a magazine article, “Two Hearts, a Romantic Journey from Friendship to Marriage.” With this basis, the novel becomes at once metatextual and truer to life, as one realizes this is in part a true story. However, while the fictional couple in the magazine story ends up married, real life takes a whole different turn for the couple. Dylan becomes Julie’s husband, while Joshua, heartbroken and lonely, decides to join the army.

For the following four years, Julie and Joshua chase each other silently – they both try and find the other, but they have cut ties so completely that it is a challenge to retrieve any information at all, let alone an address. It is in this push and pull that the story comes to life in a way that will make the reader’s heart ache with equal parts longing and frustration, along with the characters. Will the two long-time best friends find each other again? And will they ever fulfill what seems to be their destiny?

Missed opportunities, mismatches, mistakes, and incomprehension drive the plot forward – a beautiful and desperate dance that draws Joshua and Julie closer together and then drives them apart. Their struggle feels immediately relatable because Cox dexterously combines the consequences of characters’ actions with the casual coincidences of life. Unlike a traditional romance where you just know that the characters are going to pair up, there is a real degree of uncertainty that makes the story especially compelling.

Although sometimes the writing can come across as a bit removed from the whirlwind of passion experienced by the protagonists, especially in dialogue, Joshua and Julie feel real as characters because of the challenges they face – some of which are brought on by themselves, and some which are just part of the complex fabric of life. The idea that these are real people does not necessarily need to inform the narrative because each character and their circumstances are so well-drawn.

Lighthearted yet full of deep emotion, The Four Year Hitch is at once heartwrenching and thought-provoking, inspiring the reader to reflect on how life’s many small events can either divide people or bring them together.

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