Mrs., by Caitlin Macy (library ebooks):
Rich white people have issues while their kids go to a private Manhattan preschool. One mom feels out of the loop because her kid is going on scholarship; her husband is an FBI guy that is tracking the insider trading of two of the other dads.
One of those dads works at an old family bank, and his wife has Big Secrets From Her Past that he’s getting blackmailed about by a man who wants surefire investments. Bank dad delivers, because apparently it would be the end of the world if anyone found out his wife was a …
…sex worker when she first came to NYC to make it as a poor girl from a small town? That’s the big secret? I read two hundred pages+ of Upper East Side angst for this non-bomb?
I don’t know if it’s different for folks who are rich as fuck, or at least rich as heck (which seems to be the general range here), but in 2021 that just seems like Not a Thing, especially when you get a solid job as a paralegal after about a year and eventually meet your wealthy, connected husband through it. Would you put that on your place card every Friendsgiving for the one fun fact about yourself? No. But would it be worth being blackmailed to keep the secret? Uh, also and definitely no.
Because the bank dad eventually gets found out and put in jail for it. He has to sell his family’s bank, too. Basically everything gets blown up because everybody’s ashamed of sex work still.
There’s some vaguely interesting interplay between how getting the exact right things don’t make you happy, but they can distract you for a while, and how marriages squirm under the weight of (unnecessary, in my opinion) secrets, and how groups always need an outside to pick on. But none of that is especially new, and it just sort of goes away once the main problem is revealed. So this was pretty boring and disappointing.
Rich People Problems, by Kevin Kwan (library hardback): I picked up this book because I forgot my own book one day at work and if I can’t read something during my lunch break I am not at all equipped to do anything useful for the rest of the day.
So I got this off our Popular Reading shelf because I didn’t want anything I’d get too invested in, and I ended up checking it out and reading the whole thing because it’s a fun romp among the Asian 1%.
An old Taiwanese matriarch is dying, and her large, warring family comes to visit her one last time (and get in her good graces before her will is finalized). Her grandson Nick has been estranged from her since he married a lady she didn’t approve of five years prior, and he finally comes back to get her forgiveness, only to find she’d never really been mad in the first place. And granddaughter Astrid is dealing with blackmail from her soon-to-be -ex husband as she tries to build a new life with her lifelong true love, who is also trying to disentangle himself from a previous marriage.
When the matriarch dies, instead of leaving her coveted Taiwanese estate to one person in the family, she leaves it to everyone in percentages, and they have to band together to figure out what to do. Eventually, they do some sort of financial juggling that lets them keep it as a historical site while still getting money from developers, plus Nick gets to know his grandma’s loved him the whole time and vice versa, and Astrid gets to marry the dude she wanted to in the first place, so it’s like a seven-way happy ending.
The storylines are kind of simplistic, but it’s all dressed up figuratively with snappy prose and literally with descriptions of all kinds of luxuries. In a technical sense, these are like too much and bring the focus away from the substance of the book a little; but I actually loved reading them, I think because it’s fun like window shopping is. All the young folk (and those who want to act as such) are dressed impeccably in couture that I can see clearly in my mind’s eye (oh to run a finger down that hand-beaded wedding gown bodice and train!), and everybody eats things I want to pluck out of the pages into my own mouth.
Kwan does use too many adverbs, and the characters are the tiniest bit cartoonish. But only at the edges, and we get deep dives into the psyches of everybody, and they’re all complex. Except for Cousin Eddie, who just wants all the money he can possibly get by sucking up, he’s the only one who’s not any fun at one point or another.
This is a sequel of Crazy Rich Asians, which I read what seems like a billion years ago but is probably more like four or five and felt sort of let down with? I dunno, the story just seemed kind of flimsy then. But now I want to go back and reread it and see if I think the same, because I had a really good time reading this one. I think part of that is definitely because it took my mind off Pandemic Issues for a bit.
The Living is Easy, by Dorothy West (library paperback):
West was apparently a wunderkind of the Harlem Renaissance, but raise your hand if you’ve ever heard of her when you study that era. Anyone? Bueller? She was friends with all the authors who made it into literature books and won a bunch of prizes, but she had to keep working at a local paper (on Martha’s Vineyard before it was cool) until she died to stay afloat.
Which gives this story of a Black woman striving to keep up her own head and that of her family in Boston during the start of WWI a special sort of poignance. Cleo is married to a fruit empresario who specializes in bananas. He’s 25 years older than her and has her and their little daughter set up fairly comfortably, but Cleo always wants more. She schemes extra money out of him as much as she can, and when a big house comes open in a more desirable part of town, she persuades him to rent it by telling him they could get boarders. She really just wants to bring her sisters into the fold and be a big happy family again like they were growing up in South Carolina.
So she lies to her sisters about their husbands, lies to her husband about how long they’ll be, and doesn’t mention the other children until they’re already settled in with their cousin. She basically gaslights and bullies everything into place until she’s happy with it.
And it’s great, until she hears that one of the husbands is wanted for murder down south and their father died trying to help him escape. She persuades her husband to pay for the legal defense, which he can’t truly afford because his business is slipping off because of WWI. But she doesn’t pay attention to his hints, and he really hates to disappoint her. So they go slowly but surely broke as Cleo tries to pretend everything is normal.
Cleo’s such a sharp, strong character, and West has such a good hold on her flawed but determined reasoning, that I’m going to damn her with the faint praise of being an excellent antiheroine. And just when you think she’s completely heartless and all striving, something happens that hits her in the feels and she shows the vulnerability and fierce love that scaffolds all her plans and you want to weep with her.
This is not a fun read, but it is a powerful one. If you’re strong enough to read about trying to keep heads above water during our own worst times, or if you’re curious about digger into another layer of the Harlem Renaissance, I highly recommend this. It’s a fascinating slice of life Black society history as well as a lovely example of period writing that transcends its era.