OTHER PEOPLE’S FUN, by Harriet Lane
In the opening pages of Harriet Lane’s short, sharp novel “Other People’s Fun,” the book’s narrator, Ruth, runs into a former classmate named Sookie at their old English boarding school while attending a teacher’s memorial. They were not friends, but acquaintances. The best Ruth hoped for, “socially, was to fly under the radar”; Sookie, sidling about “smelling of Marlboro reds and Rive Gauche,” used to borrow Ruth’s essays.
Several decades later, Ruth is stuck in the doldrums of midlife, navigating the lonely administration of divorce and staying afloat with corporate translations. Sookie is rich, self-involved and listless. Her children are at boarding school and her husband is working abroad. “Perhaps she could do with a friend like me,” Ruth resolves.
Lane’s last book, “Her,” saw a weary mother drawn to a glamorous artist with a grudge. Her debut, “Alys, Always,” followed an unassuming copy editor who latched onto a grieving family. Beware a sudden and sympathetic new companion, especially in a Harriet Lane novel.
Ruth becomes Sookie’s confidante. She listens with guilty fascination, “despising her, despising myself.” It is Ruth who awaits the “thrill of the three pulsing dots,” and Ruth who is summoned to dinners and real estate viewings where Sookie displays her beautiful life with astounding obliviousness. Eventually, it is Ruth who becomes counselor and conspirator to Sookie’s extramarital affair. This promotion from observer to player grants her a frightening new power, and “Other People’s Fun” turns on how she will use it.
Ruth is mean. This isn’t the hand-rubbing vindictiveness of Amy Dunne in “Gone Girl,” nor the cruel, comedic front that hides Jackson Lamb’s moral code in Mick Herron’s “Slough House” novels. Instead, it’s like spending time with the worst, pettiest parts of yourself. She appraises an old schoolmate with eye-rolling dismissal (“kleptomania and an eating disorder”) and internally mocks Sookie’s lisp (“thingle thexth”) throughout the novel. There is a risk that all of this bitterness becomes trying. I have no need for a protagonist to be likable; I do want to enjoy their company.
But subtly, painfully, Lane reveals Ruth’s vulnerabilities. These moments are more affecting for their scarcity, and for the ordinariness of the wounds: spousal neglect, minor humiliations. There is a sequence when Ruth and Sookie are discussing marital horror stories. Ruth tells a story about a friend who, while hosting a lunch, fell reaching for wineglasses.
She recalls the contrast of her own worry for the woman with the woman’s husband, who had an “air of mild exasperation … as if any show of kindness or concern at that moment might encourage her to make a meal of it.” We realize, miserably, that it was Ruth who hosted this lunch; that it was Ruth who fell, and a friend who cared for her: “I remember how it felt, though, her kindness; the novelty of being looked after.” The novelty of this tenderness is just as moving.
Occasionally, Lane looks away from her central pair to peer at another of Ruth’s acquaintances. These glimpses are like brief monologues from women in middle age, and gloriously drawn: Jess tells the story of the day her mother-in-law gave her young son his first haircut, against her wishes (“she’d basically scalped him, he was actually bald”). Clare begins to luxuriate in her divorce. (“The sense of tangle and drag — the constant need to consult, cajole and compromise — has fallen away.”)
These asides work because Lane is able to summon a character or relationship with impressive brevity. “Tangle and drag”: Right away, we know the lumbering marriage and the misery of its occupants. We understand Sookie and Ruth’s teenage dynamic even without a single flashback, because Sookie would return Ruth’s essays “warped and stained with the Venn diagrams left by cans of Coke and mugs of instant coffee.”
There are quiet novels that attempt to go out in a cacophony of violence and twists. But Lane grants us an ending true to Ruth’s demeanor: unassuming, in possession of a strange and unpleasant power. I can think of few final scenes as barbaric as that of “Other People’s Fun,” and not a drop of blood is spilled.
OTHER PEOPLE’S FUN | By Harriet Lane | Little, Brown | 208 pp. | $29
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