On the Shelf <\/p>\n
Clutch <\/p>\n
By Emily Nemens
Tin House: 400 pages, $31<\/p>\n
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org<\/a>, whose fees support independent bookstores.<\/p>\n \u201cA generation ago, midlife might have been a bit of a snore, right? You have your job you\u2019re going to be in for your whole career. You have your house in the suburbs … I don\u2019t think established adulthood is that established anymore,\u201d author Emily Nemens told me from her home in Princeton, N.J., before heading out on a cross-country book tour. \u201cIt\u2019s much more pressurized and uncertain.\u201d<\/p>\n This is the foundation of the former Paris Review editor\u2019s sweeping and exquisite sophomore novel, \u201cClutch,\u201d<\/a> which features an ensemble cast of five women \u2014 all 40, give or take, and longtime friends \u2014 who reunite in Palm Springs, each at their own trying crossroads.<\/p>\n Nemens is no stranger to writing group dynamics; her critically acclaimed debut novel, \u201cThe Cactus League,\u201d<\/a> is structured in interlinked stories. She wrote it while juggling a distinguished career at literary quarterlies and making a name for herself as an artist. In the 2010s, her watercolor portraits of U.S. congresswomen<\/a> went viral for their commentary on political portraiture and the \u201cpower suit.\u201d At the time, women made up only 17% of Congress. Her new work also draws on politics \u2014 \u201cClutch\u201d is set in an era shaped by the Dobbs decision<\/a> and the state of women\u2019s health in America. <\/p>\n The Times talked to Nemens about favoring friendship on the page, bodily autonomy and her influences including California artist Wayne Thiebaud \u2014 whose painting \u201cSupine Woman\u201d is featured on the cover of her novel.<\/p>\n This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n When did the idea for \u201cClutch\u201d first come to you?<\/p>\n I went to Palm Springs with my girlfriends. The dynamics, the friction of getting people together who love each other a lot but haven\u2019t seen each other for quite a long time was eventful and felt like something to write about.<\/p>\n On your inspiration for the novel: You\u2019ve previously mentioned Mary McCarthy\u2019s novel \u201cThe Group,\u201d which has also been cited as a precursor to \u201cSex and the City.\u201d How far have we come since \u201cThe Group\u201d was published in 1963? How about \u201cSex and the City\u201d in the late \u201890s? \u201c<\/p>\n McCarthy was writing in the \u201850s and \u201860s about the \u201830s and \u201cThe Group\u201d was meant to highlight all the progress women had (and hadn\u2019t) made in this new society, new economy, new technologies, birth controls coming on. There\u2019s a certain amount of new liberation that came purportedly in the \u201830s, purportedly in the \u201860s, purportedly in the \u201890s. I mean, progress is certainly being made. You and I can get birth control and have our own credit cards, but there\u2019s also a lot of things that don\u2019t feel great. A reigning plotline in \u201cClutch\u201d is about reproductive freedom in Texas in the 2020s and just how devastating that was for so many people who care about bodily autonomy, and that doesn\u2019t feel very different than it did in the 1930s.<\/p>\n \u201cClutch\u201d puts a cast of millennial girlfriends front and center. <\/p>\n Yeah, I\u2019ve read a lot of books I admire about singular protagonists. A woman rebelling from a marriage or striking out from the role of motherhood or otherwise trying to find meaning. These novels about a singular quest. And I just kept coming up against that and thought: What happens when you try to build the infrastructure of friendships on the page?<\/p>\n We get intimate access to each of these five women \u2014 a writer, litigator, ENT physician, an actor turned politician and a consultant turned caretaker. All of them live in various parts of the country, including California, Texas and New York. It must have been hard to balance so many perspectives, plotlines and an omniscient narrator on top of it all. <\/p>\n I broke a lot of rules with that third ping-ponging perspective. Sometimes perspectives shift within a page, within a scene, moving rapidly and gleefully between points of view, and using that omniscient voice to steer us around \u2014 that was fun. I was cognizant of balance and understanding the lazy-Susan of it. Making sure I was spinning all the way around the table and touching each piece in each storyline.<\/p>\n Why midlife?<\/p>\n I love a bildungsroman as a novel conceit and as a framing device. But, sometimes, moving beyond that realization of the adult you want to be and actually being that adult is harder and more complicated and maybe more interesting, at least as I am and perceive it right now.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve worked as an editor in some of the literary world\u2019s most prestigious posts, notably at the Paris Review. Do you miss it since pivoting toward your own writing and teaching? <\/p>\n Making magazines was a thrill and a gift and exhausting. In that order. Not every editor is quite as catholic with a little c, as ecumenical, as excited about such a range of writing as I am. I wanted to see not one style of writing, but a broad range of writing that I felt had both ambition and execution.<\/p>\n One of the things that\u2019s hard about being an editor, particularly an acquiring editor, is how often you have to say no. As a teacher now, I never say no. I say \u201cyes.\u201d Instead, I ask: What else can this be doing? That attitude adjustment is glorious.<\/p>\n Back to \u201cClutch,\u201d what does female friendship mean to you? Do you see your friends\u2019 qualities in these five women? <\/p>\n Female friendship has been such a gift. I don\u2019t have children, I have a really supportive partner and I have this wonderful, creative professional life, but I can\u2019t imagine it without my friends. There are certainly flints of autobiography and different friends in different characters \u2014 they\u2019ve read it and liked it, and if they saw themselves, they were pleasant about it.<\/p>\n Tell me about the painting on the cover of the book. It really speaks to what these women are going through. <\/p>\n Getting the rights to the painting was a real coup! It\u2019s called \u201cSupine Woman\u201d by Wayne Thiebaud. It was painted in 1963 \u2014 its own little Easter egg is that it came out the same year as \u201cThe Group.\u201d<\/p>\n It depicts a woman dressed all in white who is lying on the floor. You\u2019d assume from the pose that she\u2019s sleeping, except her eyes are wide open, and in this frightened or startled expression. To me, it\u2019s indicative of what the women in \u201cClutch\u201d are going through. This is that moment right after you get knocked down, right before you get up again and that emotional tenor proceeds for a lot of the novel.<\/p>\n