OTHER PEOPLE'S FUN

A portrait of toxic friendship between a woman who has everything and one who has lost what little she ever had.

“Old school friends” would be the easy label for what Sookie Utley and Ruth Saving are to one another, though they’ve had no contact in the decades since they left their fancy British boarding school, and they weren’t friends back then, either. Sookie remembers Ruth only because she let her crib from her essays; Ruth remembers the beautiful and popular Sookie primarily for fainting during a school concert, at which point the music teacher Ruth herself was infatuated with—Ian Waxham—lifted Sookie up and carried her out “like that scene in An Officer and a Gentleman.” Ruth is a familiar creepy character in the emotional thriller genre: socially awkward, miserably lonely, insecure, jealous, judgmental, mildly kleptomaniac. And, though the exact nature of her husband’s disappearance is withheld for so long that you start to suspect funny business, he has simply left her for another woman. What won’t Ruth do to make herself feel better? Filching Sookie’s Stella McCartney sunglasses is clearly just step one. Despite the fact that she can’t stand her, Ruth acquiesces to Sookie’s need for a doormat friend she can burden with her endless self-involved chatter, which revolves around her irritating first-world problems and her extramarital affair with…none other than ol’ Waxham! In fact, she and Waxham need a spot to rendezvous. How about Ruth’s place? This short novel tracks Ruth’s growing need and evolving schemes for revenge, its predictable lineaments invigorated by Lane’s sharp writing and observational skills. If Lane is ready to try her talents on another type of story, readers will follow.

Connoisseurs of queasy female self-hatred will find their favorite dish here.