Modern Lovers

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Fiction
The fickle nature of fame

MODERN LOVERS
By Emma Straub
353 pp. Riverhead Books

Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D.

The central character of this book is a young woman named Ruby, “a black Jew with lesbian moms.”  When the book begins, she is a senior but hates high school and the SAT as well. She likes a lad named Dust who sports a shaved head and a chipped tooth and is good at skateboarding and oral sex. Ruby’s moms – Jane and Zoe, run a very successful restaurant, Hyacinth, in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. Zoe spends her time hunched over her computer, working on the payroll and the schedules and the billing for the restaurant. Jane dreams of heirloom tomatoes from New Jersey, perfect soft-shelled crabs and corn so fresh “you could just peel the silk back and eat the kernels right off the cob” when she isn’t cooking. In college Zoe and Jane were “screwing every day between one period and the next,” but now not at all and they are barely talking.

And then there’s Elizabeth and Andrew. All four characters had met and hooked up at Oberlin College. Elizabeth and Andrew met fairly early on in their college career and soon became an item. Elizabeth seemed much more committed to him than he was to her. However, late in the book Elizabeth confesses a love for Zoe that almost comes to something while they are watching Bonnie and Clyde. Zoe confesses, “I definitely was hitting on you. Pretty hard, too.” Elizabeth thinks that if she had met Zoe a little bit earlier or a little bit later, her whole life could have been different. Zoe’s partner Jane said of Elizabeth’s feelings for Zoe, “But I also know the way she looks at you, like you are her fucking chocolate ice cream cone and she wants to eat your brains and live inside your body.”

The narrator writes about such relationships,

Timing was everything – that was more and more obvious the older you got, when you finally understood that the universe wasn’t held together in any way that made sense. There was no order, there was no plan. It was all about what you had for breakfast, and what kind of mood you were in when you walked down a certain hallway, and whether the person who tried to kiss you had good breath or bad. There was no fate. Life was just happenstance and luck, bound together by the desire for order. Elizabeth understood why so many people believed in God – it was precisely for this reason, so they’d never have to close their eyes and think, What the fuck did I do to my life?

Throughout the story is Lydia, a pretty but unreliable character outside the foursome at Oberlin College. She burns brighter than all the rest, but is widely regarded as a snake.  She sleeps with one of the men and is sexually attractive to both of the women. Elizabeth writes a song at school entitled “Mistress of Myself,” and Lydia sings it. The song appeal to “pissed-off young women, sensitive young men, teenagers of any description as long as they were angsty, breast-feeding mothers, everyone who had a boss they hated or a lover she wasn’t getting enough attention from – the song applied in a surprising number of categories.” The song was the best known number performed by the group’s band – Kitty’s Mustache, a tip of the hat to Tolstoy’s heroine-Princess Ekaterina “Kitty” Scherbackaya in Anna Karenina.

The making of a movie recounting Lydia’s career before she dies of a heroin overdose intrudes during the second half of the book. Preparations for filming stir up lots of old memories and a passel of previously unrevealed events that starts the two couples reflecting on their past, their lives, and the fickle nature of fame.

This is a well-told tale centering on the area near Flatbush Avenue in the old Dutch settlement of Brooklyn. It’s a very enjoyable read.