Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0to get it in your inbox every month.<\/p>\nStephanie Wambugu\u2019s uncommonly elegant debut novel opens on a note of deflated celebration. The narrator, Ruth, is gathered around her birthday cake with her husband, friends, and neighbors, but her friend Maria, who taught Ruth that \u201cwithout an obsession life was impossible,\u201d is missing from the packed room. \u201cI\u2019d forgotten,\u201d Ruth thinks. \u201cNow, I remembered.\u201d A painter born to emotionally distant Kenyan immigrants, Ruth\u2019s baseline skews polite and well-behaved, so instead of making this \u201cepiphany\u201d heard, she stifles it, feigning contentment and making conversation with her mentor. In the following days, multiple people ask her if she\u2019s okay. At her New York art opening, where she meets up with her \u201chusband and other strangers,\u201d she drunkenly mistakes one of them for Maria. Despite the night\u2019s success \u2014 all her paintings sell \u2014 she ditches the after-party and passes out alone in her hotel room. \u201cI started the story from the beginning before falling asleep,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Lonely Crowds unfolds as a coming-of-age story with whiffs of Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Elena Ferrante. The scope is ambitious; Wambugu, who is also an editor at Joyland Magazine and shares her Kenyan origins with Ruth, follows the friends from their childhood in Providence attending a mostly white Catholic school into their early adulthood in \u201990s New York City. Ruth is 9 years old and entering the third grade when she first glimpses Maria, a poor Black girl from Panama who, after losing her bipolar mother to suicide, is living with her aunt who suffers from the same condition. For Ruth, it\u2019s destiny at first sight: \u201cI had been nervous about the new school, and knowing that Maria awaited me had transformed my anxieties into pure interest,\u201d she thinks. \u201cAll we needed to do was see one another again and our lives would begin.\u201d She isn\u2019t wrong. At school, they are drawn to each other and Maria soon spends most days at Ruth\u2019s home.<\/p>\n
According to Ruth, Maria is the brilliant one. She has the talent, wit, and confidence that Ruth dreams of, and it occasionally gets her into trouble. Even as a young girl, Maria is the initiator, far more familiar with the world of adults. She has a relationship with their music teacher that can only be read as inappropriate even though no explicit revelation ever comes. \u201cI often listened without understanding, hoping someone would enlighten me,\u201d says Ruth, who is happy to live in Maria\u2019s shadow. \u201cI wasn\u2019t sure if awareness would come with age or if I was just dull.\u201d The two share a physical space \u2014 Ruth\u2019s bed, bathtubs, clothes \u2014 and later, dreams of upward mobility. What Maria wants, Ruth learns to want; Maria poses for Ruth\u2019s drawings and tells her they\u2019ll both go to art school.<\/p>\n
Any woman who has experienced deep friendship with another knows it\u2019s complicated. With time, it only gets worse. You get stuck in the same stories, with the same roles. You know each other so well that the weight of what goes unsaid over the years eventually makes it near impossible to be honest. Love becomes envy and turns into resentment, and the person who loves you most also knows how best to wound you. Lonely Crowds lives in the margins of desire and jealousy, intimacy and individuation, certainty and ambivalence. But it\u2019s most interested in that tantalizing, agonizing ambiguity that young queer girls can share between friendship and romantic love.<\/p>\n
Once Ruth and Maria arrive at Bard, the two friends start to go their own ways, and their new distance makes their less frequent interactions increasingly charged. Ruth\u2019s obsession with Maria becomes complicated by her physical desire for her \u2014 which surprises her each time it surfaces in a touch or a prick of jealousy. While Maria comes out as a lesbian and settles into a relationship with a wealthy girl who picks up on some kind of vibe between the friends, Ruth dallies with a moody English boy and has her first awkward same-sex experience. But even after Maria initiates sex with Ruth, things between them remain unclear. Is Ruth a repressed lesbian, like Maria claims? Is Maria bipolar, like her mother and aunt were? Does Ruth have romantic feelings for Maria? And does Maria return them?<\/p>\n
Much of the novel\u2019s power comes from its unanswered questions, which are allowed to remain unresolved in part because Ruth is a remote and unflappable narrator, giving the fine-tuned appearance of being direct without actually revealing much of what she wants. Ruth\u2019s nonchalance often comes encased in a delightful deadpan. When assigned to read Three Lives at Bard, Ruth says, \u201cI had never heard of Gertrude Stein before and was interested to learn she had lived in Paris, slept with women, and repeated herself a great deal. That sounded like an interesting life and indeed the book had been interesting, more than interesting.\u201d Despite experiencing \u201cnothing short of rapture\u201d reading Stein \u2014 a famously gay woman \u2014 she sits silently in class. \u201cIf I spoke,\u201d she explains, \u201cI risked saying not only to others, but to myself, what I had denied without even knowing I had denied it.\u201d What she has denied knowing, she doesn\u2019t tell us. Ruth\u2019s supposed reliability is often leveraged to hide deeper truths, especially from herself.<\/p>\n
The echoes with the My Brilliant Friend quartet, which is built on a frame narrative establishing the non-narrating friend\u2019s disappearance, are unmissable. Though Wambugu\u2019s spin is explicitly queer, Black, and focused on first-generation immigrants, the dynamic each book explores feels just as alive between fledging visual artists in New York City in the \u201990s as it does between aspiring writers on the poor outskirts of Naples in the \u201950s. Wambugu\u2019s prose has a propulsive, almost hypnotic drive, and she knows how to keep it moving, getting through about as much time in one book as Ferrante does in three. At times, that flow comes at the expense of physical or sensorial detail; we only know that Ruth and Maria look alike because a few people mention it in passing. Like everything we learn about these characters, their likenesses and differences are funneled through Ruth\u2019s perspective, which in time reveals itself to be more limited than we may have initially suspected.<\/p>\n
The only problem with this whole equation is that Maria seems like a pretty shit friend. The novel tends to treat Ruth\u2019s desire to stick with her as a given, relying on how identifiable this dynamic is without making Maria feel like a whole person. While those familiar with the tumult of a close female friendship can use Maria as a placeholder for their own more brilliant demons, a reader of the genre can\u2019t help but miss Lila, who pushes Len\u00f9 to become the best writer she could despite her cutting comments, her cunning. Lila is mesmerizing precisely because she is frightening, vivifying the girls\u2019 drab childhood. With such a formidable precedent, you can\u2019t help but ask, is Maria ruthless enough? And is she as brilliant, as bold, as superior as Ruth would have us believe?<\/p>\n
Objects of obsession are always standing in for what we want them to be, and Lonely Crowds is a thrilling and capacious novel about intimacy and art-making in which the narrator proves to be more compelling than her muse. Even if I wanted to be as infatuated with Maria as Ruth is, the book is seductive, so much so that I almost forgot Maria\u2019s initial absence. Wambugu delivers on that mystery with a gutting final encounter that\u2019s both shocking and inevitable, true to the melancholy that underpins Ruth\u2019s whole story. Even her happiest memory \u2014 an evening lying on the campus lawn, carefree and absinthe-drunk with Maria and their friends \u2014 is punctured by impending loss: \u201cI longed for it before it was over.\u201d<\/p>\n
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