BEST OFFER WINS, by Marisa Kashino
According to the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (and a great many Etsy mugs), “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” They rarely make intriguing fictional heroines, either. Luckily, Marisa Kashino’s debut novel, “Best Offer Wins,” set in the wilds of Washington, D.C.-area real estate, has no such problem.
By Page 64, a striving publicist named Margo Miyake has trespassed onto the property of her unlisted-but-soon-to-be-for-sale dream house; stalked one of its owners, Jack Lombardi, at a hot yoga class; and presented herself as a kindly role model for Jack’s adoptive daughter, Penny, who is Chinese American — all in a feral attempt to score the fully renovated 1940s colonial before it hits the market.
More than ill-behaved, Margo is unhinged and unapologetic — picture Amy Dunne of “Gone Girl” as a client on “House Hunters” — which makes her steady descent into madness an easy sell. (Hulu has already purchased the television rights, with the “Past Lives” actress Greta Lee set to star.)
Kashino, a former journalist who oversaw real estate coverage at Washingtonian magazine, is presumably novelizing what she knows: home-buying as guerrilla warfare. Margo and her vanilla husband, Ian, have already lost out on 11 houses, thanks to the privileged hordes willing to waive inspections, pay all cash and bid up the price to “some grotesque number.”
To be clear, most of the problems here are first world. Margo isn’t grateful to have shelter, only appalled that it’s a glass fishbowl rental apartment (ugh!) in the hip neighborhood of Shaw. The quest is crazy-making as she goes full “Fatal Attraction” over Jack and his husband Curtis’s four-bedroom, 2.5-bath gem in tony Bethesda, Md. In one delightfully sociopathic scene, she orders new antique bronze house numbers … for the house she does not yet own. Hope, as she muses, is a “familiar poison.”
I cringed at some snippets of Margo’s dialogue, not knowing if Kashino meant for her to speak like a Corcoran listing — “Is it wood-burning?” she casually asks Jack of his fireplace. But it worked to show that Margo is just that obsessed, especially because her real estate foibles are inextricably linked to another angst-ridden pursuit: trying to conceive. (Among other things, she attempts to force-feed Ian walnuts to boost his sperm count.) A bitter refrain — “No house, no baby” — plays endlessly in Margo’s mind like a CNN ticker.
Kashino nails the details down to the Carrara marble countertops — but more important, she captures the idea that agents aren’t just selling houses, but dreams. Bethesda is “the kind of place where people get into bird-watching and growing their own tomatoes,” she writes. “Where the only time you hear sirens is when the fire department wants to spice things up at the Christmas parade.”
That fantasy looms large for Margo, who, a little too conveniently, grew up in a series of homes that were not “blanketed” in Italian marble. Still, the best passage of the novel is a golden daydream in which she sees a little girl dangling on the tire swing in Jack and Curtis’s yard while a toasty Norman Rockwell holiday unfolds inside. Peering at the imaginary child through French doors, Margo realizes, “It’s me.”
Determined to make the couple’s 12th bid their last, Margo comes undone via a blackmail plot and an ill-advised road trip to West Virginia. Just how far she’ll go felt almost too surprising. Most of the time, Margo comes off like an aspiring tradwife whose antics could inspire a Netflix documentary but probably wouldn’t land her in jail. On rare, jarring occasions, though, she slips into a darker, edgier voice, with blunt sexual references and insults unpublishable here, that felt more fitting for a thriller than a black comedy.
Which kind of book does “Best Offer Wins” want to be? Margo describes the battle for Curtis and Jack’s house as “a slow, pointless march toward inevitable devastation.” By the end, the same could be said for her mental state.
BEST OFFER WINS | By Marisa Kashino | Celadon | 288 pp. | $27.99
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