CLUTCH

A crew of five women friends, long-distance since college, weather the travails of their 40th year.

Each chapter of Nemens’ sophomore novel opens with a line or two from the group chat shared by Carson the writer, Gregg the politician, Hillary the doctor, Bella the litigator, and Reba the former consultant, or with one of their individual texts to or from someone else. This infrastructure helps move the timeline and the plot; in addition, a thumbnail guide to the characters appears at the beginning of the book. With five central characters, many supporting ones, and a trajectory covering two decades, almost year by year, these elements are helpful. “Another quiet stretch for the women was 2014. In the eighteen months prior they had all turned thirty (Reba, with her basketball gap year, was the first across the threshold; Gregg brought up the rear).” As the omniscient narrator goes on to fill in details from each friend, as well as current events, cultural moments, and updates on Britney Spears, it’s tempting to picture giant timelines papering the walls of the author’s study. Her management of the five-pronged, often high-drama plot, the rotating points of view, and the characters’ constant introspection is impressive. Yet somehow the sheer complexity of it all keeps the book from developing enough momentum to ever become fully immersive, and none of the five main characters evokes the kind of identification that invites the reader to connect emotionally. A typical moment has Carson meditating on the ways she and each of her friends has fallen short of their dreams. Gregg, for example, “was blind to the gotcha of promoting progressivism while being inextricably bound up with the latest (last?) stage of late-stage capitalism; she couldn’t see, or wouldn’t acknowledge, her normie marriage, the patriarchy of her prenup, how her big-shouldered and bruising careerist tendencies, cloaked as they were in pastel blazers, were only nominally better than Zeke’s cutthroat business acumen.” In fact, that cutthroat acumen of Gregg’s husband Zeke will play a major role in the book’s gut-punch climax, rewarding the reader who’s paying attention to all the details.

Full of intelligence, social consciousness, and cultural engagement.