LONELY CROWDS

An artist contemplates her complex relationship with her best friend.

Wambugu’s debut novel opens with Ruth, a successful painter, grappling with the absence of her friend: “When I met Maria, I learned that without an obsession life was impossible to live.” The rest of the novel moves back in time to unravel the roots of that obsession. Their story opens in their poor Pawtucket, Rhode Island, neighborhood when Ruth—the quiet, sheltered daughter of emotionally distant Kenyan immigrants—meets Maria, a gifted Panamanian orphan staying with her mentally ill aunt. Nearly a decade later, the girls graduate from their Catholic high school and attend Bard College, a small liberal arts school in New York’s Hudson Valley, to study art: painting and film, respectively. As Maria carves out a space within the overwhelmingly rich and white social circles, Ruth finds herself on the outskirts of her friendship with Maria—and even her own life. When Ruth, Maria, and Sheila, Maria’s wealthy girlfriend, move to New York City after graduation, a gulf begins to open between the friends. While Ruth struggles to make her art and a living, Maria continues to find professional and social success. Their hard-to-define relationship faces the ultimate test when they have to decide what, if anything, they are willing to give up for each other. The novel shows all the ways that their friendship—warm and cold, tender and terrible—exists in the area between extremes. Maria takes up an outsized space in Ruth’s life, and Ruth allows herself to be at the whims of Maria’s wants or needs. Despite hurting each other, they are bonded in a way that only long-term female friends seem capable of—and this novel distills this dynamic with devastating precision. Writing beautifully about ambition, class, art, domesticity, identity, and complacency, Wambugu’s prose is as striking as it is sure.

A heartbreaking and penetrating coming-of-age debut.