Book No. 67 of 2020
I really, really enjoyed this book, which on its face doesn’t have the most gripping of premises (wealthy, successful, newly divorced couple pick up the pieces of their lives and ruminate on their unhappiness) but is brilliantly structured and punchingly meta. Brodesser-Akner’s writing is scorchingly, brutally accurate and resonant and all-examining. (I thought very often of the Tolstoy quote about all happy families being alike but every unhappy family being unhappy in its own way.)
One of the things I appreciate most about the narrative is something I don’t really want to spoil, because the unfolding is so enjoyable: it has to do with the narration itself, the way it appears initially to be your standard omniscient third-person, but tilts, subtly at first, and then more so, to demonstrate that the story has multifaceted angles you didn’t realize were there. One character’s journalistic observation that women are listened to when they tell a man’s story with their own framework appears, at first, to be a throwaway thought, and then reveals itself to be a crucial lens.
The shift in the second part of the story is masterfully done, with repetition used beautifully as a device for conveying the psychological state of its protagonist.
Similar Reads
This pairs well, in theme and setting, with Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success.
I also thought that Wednesday Martin’s Primates of Park Avenue prepared me well for re-entering the world of the wealthy Manhattan elite.
There is no way you can get around comparing this to Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise; the shift and reveal is so similar, though I enjoyed this much more.
The arc of a wife’s sudden absence and the reveal of a relationship’s issues (as well as the broader issue of the expectation placed on women in heterosexual relationships) via the two POVs reminded me of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.