WANT
By Lynn Steger Strong
Last winter, when we were all still riding the subways, a friend and I noticed a 20-something couple making out on a downtown train and she asked, “Remember that?” But next to the couple was a group of adolescent girls so fiercely in sync with one another — hugging, talking, laughing — that they almost missed their stop. “Remember that?” I thought, even more wistfully, mourning those early intense friendships that were as close as if not closer than romances — the ones that you thought were going to last.
So I empathized with Elizabeth, the confessional narrator of “Want,” Lynn Steger Strong’s moving second novel. Her now severed friendship with Kayla carried them both through high school, college, mental illness and drug addiction — until it broke, years ago, under all that weight. Left mourning, Elizabeth has taken to cyberstalking Kayla on social media in her free time, which is almost nonexistent. An English literature Ph.D. who, like so many of her peers, could not land a university position, Elizabeth now has two jobs that don’t quite equal one salary: teaching by day in a charter high school and at night as an adjunct at her alma mater. Elizabeth also has two little girls, 2 and 4 years old, and a charming husband who hasn’t been able to make a living since Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, when he left finance “to do custom carpentry for the sorts of people that he used to work with.” It hasn’t panned out, thus the onus is on Elizabeth to support her family in their Brooklyn one-bedroom, a burden she finds crushing. She hates the school she teaches in, playing hooky as often as she can to read books in cafes and browse art galleries. At home she flees the tedium of runny noses and the anxiety of bankruptcy by taking long, hard runs every morning, and treating herself to movies with the one credit card that still works. She is estranged from her wealthy lawyer parents, who threaten to seek custody of her children, citing Elizabeth and her husband’s financial ineptitude. In the midst of these crises, a desperate Elizabeth reaches out to the haunting Kayla, only to discover that her ex-friend’s own life has also taken a turn for the worse. Can their long-lost bond save them both now?
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of July. See the full list. ]
As a narrator, Elizabeth is smart and funny and literary to the marrow. The books she inhales for sustenance have turned out to be a great addition to my own pandemic pile. (Thank you, Ms. Strong.) But her tale of woe is in many ways painfully familiar, and “Want” often reads like the plotless treadmill diary of a 30-something artist-class white Brooklynite who was born into what she unrealistically thought was a safer, more forgiving world. As I read on, engaged, sympathetic and often frustrated, I found myself in that strange space of feeling deeply for her predicament, yet wanting to shake sense into her: Keep your two lousy jobs and send your husband back to work!
[ Read an excerpt from “Want.” ]
But what looks at first glance like a couple too entitled and spoiled to face the music ultimately lays bare what happens to people so vulnerable and idealistic that they are seemingly unable to climb out of the hole they’ve dug together. Viewed from that angle, the book proved more interesting, and it turns out some of the heroine’s fecklessness is related to long-ago psychological torment that brought both Elizabeth and Kayla to their knees.
Of course, when the two reunite they find no panacea for past and present turmoil. Rather, through kindness, they provide all that friends can for each other: nourishment. And it ends up being enough — what the great Raymond Carver termed “a small, good thing.” While it doesn’t fix the world or even pay the rent, in companionship there is grace.
"want" - Google News
July 07, 2020 at 04:13PM
https://ift.tt/2Z3noCC
In ‘Want,’ a Lost Friendship and the Anxieties of the Modern Family - The New York Times
"want" - Google News
https://ift.tt/31yeVa2
https://ift.tt/2YsHiXz
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "In ‘Want,’ a Lost Friendship and the Anxieties of the Modern Family - The New York Times"
Post a Comment