THE LIFEGUARDS
by Amanda Eyre Ward
When three boys discover a corpse on the bike trail, the warm alliance between their moms begins to fracture.
Ward’s latest showcases three women from the upscale Austin, Texas, suburb of Barton Hills. There's Whitney, a real estate mogul who, along with her British husband, sells underground bunkers to billionaire tech bros who are thinking ahead to climate apocalypse. There's Liza, a struggling single mom and a food writer who is barely making rent with odd jobs and dog walking. She's desperately clinging to her membership in the rich mom's club, praying no one finds out how broke she is or asks her anything at all about her past. And there's Annette, a basketball superstar from Laredo turned reluctant trophy wife to the obnoxious heir to a West Texas oil fortune. Over the years of raising their sons together, these women have forged what they believe to be an unbreakable friendship, and as the book opens, they have sent the boys off together to their summer jobs as lifeguards at Barton Springs, an iconic Austin swimming hole. When the trio comes home panicky and panting, reporting that they found a dead woman's body on the greenbelt, their moms are 100% sure the boys didn't know her and had nothing to do with it. That doesn't last long. Ward does a great job of skewering the particular bougie lifestyles and Austin milieux she evokes. She smoothly manages a large cast of characters with a constantly shifting point of view; the disconnect between the kids' reality and the moms' naïve understanding is spot-on. Comic relief is provided by an ongoing text conversation among the Barton Hills Mamas—chardonnayismyjam, teslaluvr, marykaymom, and the rest—for whom gossip knows no limits of decency or taste. But after all the suspense and ticking of the clock, the ending is a head-scratcher. Plausibility aside, what even happened in the final scene? And to the guilty party? The happy ending is nice but, in this case, feels incomplete.
A knowing, clever, and entertaining visit to the sinister underside of motherhood, good friends, and sunny days.