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Mutual Interest is my favorite book I’ve read this year. I loved it. It’s wry, witty, heartrending, extremely cleverly written, and takes a massively wide-angle lens that charmed me enormously. I’m going to keep this review brief and vague, because (even more than usual) I want to recommend that you head into this book knowing as little as possible about plot specifics. If that doesn’t suit you, I can offer you my colleague’s very fine review at Shelf Awareness, which sold me on the book in the first place: longer version here, shorter here.

Here is what I do want you to know:

This brilliant second novel (following Glassworks, which I have not read) is set mostly in Manhattan at the turn of the century from 1800s to 1900s. Our chief protagonist is from Utica, NY, where an unsatisfactory childhood sends her out into a wider world, wringing a life out of her charm, machinations, expert read of other humans, and desperation. Vivian is, arguably, a bit of a con artist, and certainly a master manipulator, but in her own mind, she improves the lot of those she works upon even as she improves her own; she would like us to believe that her exploits are benign, and she is so skilled that we mostly believe her. Eventually, her life will intertwine (she will quite purposefully intertwine it) with two others, in both public and private spheres. I think I’m going to stop there.

Between the ups and downs, loves and heartaches, foibles and hilarities, mad successes and stomach-dropping setbacks of Vivian and her two friends, Wolfgang-Smith employs an immensely omniscient narrator to make observations about the shape of a wide, wide world. “Time and cause unravel in all directions,” this voice tells us, and it all starts with a volcanic eruption, and a bicycle. This astonishing, entertaining, wrenching novel left me reeling; I hope you love it, too.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: historical fiction, LGBTQ |