ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT

A young woman reckons with her first job, her first love, and her first real friends.

After she graduates from college, Sneha—the headstrong, intensely self-reliant narrator of this lovely novel—is lucky to find a job as a corporate consultant. It’s the height of the mid-2000s recession, and Sneha’s immigrant parents have been deported to their native India. Sneha moves to Milwaukee, where she tries on adulthood like an ill-fitting suit. Nothing comes easily: Her landlord has it out for her; her new girlfriend, Marina, seems to want more than Sneha can give; and then Peter, Sneha’s boss, stops paying her. Meanwhile, a childhood trauma is demanding to be reckoned with. In her debut novel, Mathews achieves what so often seems to be impossible: a deeply felt “novel of ideas,” for lack of a better phrase. Mathews somehow tackles the big abstractions—capitalism, gender, sexuality, Western individualism, etc.—while at the same time imbuing her characters with such real, flawed humanity that they seem ready to walk right off the page. Rarely is dialogue rendered so accurately. When Marina catches Sneha in a lie and demands an explanation, Sneha says, “Because I am a trash person and a coward.” In her prose, Mathews can be deeply moving at the same time that she is funny; she dips into slang in a way that feels lyrical and rhythmic. “Bro,” Sneha tells another friend, “the molecules of my whole body are just carbon and abandonment issues.” If the novel seems to drag toward the end, this feels like a small, stingy criticism for a book that is, as a whole, beautifully written, lusciously felt, and marvelously envisioned.

Resplendent with intelligence, wit, and feeling.