Literary fiction. Race, class, gender, and nonmonogamy. Follows a 23 year-old Black woman who begins the book as a low-level employee at a publisher in New York and who leads what you might describe as a sexually abundant but relationally poor life. The book begins as she starts dating a relatively well-off older white man who is in a newly nonmonogamous marriage. And somehow, part way through the book, she ends up unemployed and living with him and his family in the suburbs. This book is part of that strand of literary fiction for whom people boil down to unique clusters of dysfunction and stories are the path of interaction of those clusters. Which actually sounds harsher than I mean it – I don’t love that particular tendency in some literary fiction, and I didn’t love this book early on, but it definitely grew on me by the end, and there is no denying its keen insight into the microdynamics of power that organize our self-hood and saturate our every interaction. The pattern of dysfunction exhibited by the main character’s lover is more or less what you would predict of a middle-class professional hetero man in a not-terribly-happy marriage who is looking to sleep with someone half his age. This makes him not just pathetic but uninteresting, but I get the sense that is a deliberate and pointed choice by the author. Similarly, the path of dysfunction traced by the relationship between the main character and said lover is not terribly interesting either, and is more or less within the bounds you would predict based on the book’s premise. But the relationships between the main character and her lover’s wife and (adopted Black) daughter are much more interesting, and much more exemplary of the ways in which nonmonogamy can make normatively unthinkable relational configurations perfectly plausible and ordinary, and in which books that explore nonmonogamy can use it to tell interesting and insightful stories. Like I said, didn’t love the book early on, but was quite into it by the end.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.