LONELY CROWDS, by Stephanie Wambugu
In a novella collected in Gertrude Stein’s 1909 book “Three Lives,” Melanctha, a young biracial woman in a segregated American coastal town, yearns for the kind of knowledge and life experience that social norms (and her controlling father) forbid. At 16, she meets the older, sexually progressive, alcoholic Jane Harden, who teaches Melanctha everything she knows — including the power of worship itself.
“There was nothing good or bad in doing, feeling, thinking or in talking, that Jane spared her,” Stein writes. “Sometimes the lesson came almost too strong for Melanctha, but somehow she always managed to endure it and so slowly, but always with increasing strength and feeling, Melanctha began to really understand.”
Reading “Three Lives” in an undergraduate literature seminar at Bard College, Ruth, the narrator of Stephanie Wambugu’s extraordinary first novel, “Lonely Crowds,” finds herself so moved that she slams the book shut and hurls it across her dorm room, shaking. “I followed this character on her search for wisdom and felt I had actually taken part in her endeavors in the way dreaming of falling is like falling,” she says. “I understood what it meant to sit at Jane’s feet and how quickly those long hours spent kneeling at her feet must’ve passed because I understood devotion.”
Devotion — unquestioning, self-sacrificing, one-sided, sublime — is the overwhelming concern of this bildungsroman about two best friends from suburban Rhode Island making their way into adulthood and the art scene in 1990s New York City. The object of Ruth’s is Maria, the only other Black girl in their Catholic school class, whom she first encounters in line to purchase school uniforms. Ruth sees a woman and child turned away by the shopkeeper for insufficient funds, and the girls make eye contact as Maria is shuffled away, her “wide black eyes” utterly “without shame.”
For the 9-year-old protagonist, the only child of working-class immigrants — her strict Kenyan mother works as a secretary in a doctor’s office and her dejected, disillusioned father struggles to hold down a job — it’s infatuation at first sight.
Ruth quickly learns that her new classmate is as daring and ungovernable as Ruth is rule-abiding and inhibited — and why. The woman raising Maria is her bipolar aunt; her mother suffered from the same condition and killed herself, and Maria has never met her father. Ruth’s family effectively takes Maria in, and the narrator spends much of high school painting portraits of her friend: “impressionistic, muted half nudes of a girl whose face I’d seen so many times, from so many angles, and who still appeared novel and even alarming depending on the light of the hour.”
She follows Maria to Bard, happily intending to live a life “riding Maria’s coattails”; and from there their bond both fractures and intensifies under the accumulating pressures of money — i.e. survival — on their artistic and romantic paths.
If Vivian Gornick wrote fiction, it might look something like “Lonely Crowds”: a middle-aged academic’s cool, confessional recounting of her earlier life, her imperfect parentage and feminist awakening and urban detachment.
Like Gornick, Wambugu writes with an easy wit, her sentences as approachable as her deeply relatable narrator. Of a pivotal night out, Ruth reflects: “Not once in my life had I been invited to a party and thought … That seems like an opportunity to have fun and leave feeling better about myself, but you inevitably longed for the warmth of people packed into a cramped room.” Returning to Bard from a visit home, she articulates her perceived maturity with perfect adolescent simplicity.
I felt like a changeling, like I had nothing at all to do with my parents or this place where I’d lived. How to explain my new life to them, the things I’d learned? That the powerful were evil while the weak were good, that a few evenings before, I’d had sex with a woman my mother’s age and enjoyed it. Did my mother know that women were no different than men and that race was a social construct?
There is nothing groundbreaking or experimental about this novel’s conceit; it’s about as classic a coming-of-age as you’ll find. But as Ruth grows up and into an independent perspective whose outlines can finally be distinguished from those of the people she grew up with, it’s the specificity of this young woman’s mind, the contours with which she draws the characters and environments around her, that make “Lonely Crowds” exceptional.
And of these surroundings there is one whose gravitational pull overpowers all the others. Like Jane Harden’s, Maria’s influence on her subject blurs the lines between sister, friend, lover, muse; it also increases in direct proportion to the effort it requires. Maria summons Ruth when it suits her — to accompany her to meet her deadbeat dad, for instance, or to attend her gallery openings — but disappears without contact for days or months at a time. She disparages Ruth’s jobs and boyfriends and initiates sex with her only to return again and again to her wealthy, white girlfriend.
As hopeless as Ruth might seem in the face of her infatuation, Wambugu shows that the state of devotion can be more about the giver than the receiver. “When I met Maria, I learned that without an obsession life was impossible to live,” Ruth reflects decades on. “I’d forgotten. Now, I remembered.”
LONELY CROWDS | By Stephanie Wambugu | Little, Brown | 288 pp. | $28
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