HOW COULD SHE

Mechling’s first novel for adults is a sharp dissection of the fraught dynamics of 30-something female friendship.

In their first years of adulthood, Sunny, Rachel, and Geraldine worked together at a Toronto magazine, where they became, if not a trio—Sunny and Rachel never got along—then at least an intimate triangle. And then they scattered: Sunny, an artist and illustrator whose life has always flowed with an ease befitting her name, moved to New York and married rich; Rachel, a confessional lifestyle writer and an American, returned to her native Brooklyn, where she married a nice man, had a baby, and took up a fledgling second career writing YA novels; and Geraldine, the unlucky one despite her beauty, who stayed in Toronto and who—since getting dumped by her fiance—has been living in Sunny’s old apartment, a demonstration of Sunny’s magnanimity. And then Geraldine moves to New York. This, in itself, does not disrupt their equilibrium, though it does expose the fissures. What disrupts their equilibrium is that, in New York, amid a dying industry, Geraldine is a success. The plot is minimal, in terms of what actually “happens”—Sunny’s glamorous life is not so glamorous; Rachel worries she’s wasted her career on fluff; Geraldine gets into podcasting; media is flailing; men are difficult—because what actually matters is what’s happening in the characters' heads. Their relationships to each other are delicate and often painful but also essential to their understanding of their own adult lives: More important than liking each other, they’ve built their identities around each other. Mechling details these dynamics with accountantlike precision so that the action is in the small slights and hurts and oversights that have accumulated over the years between them. While the novel flits lightly on the surface, even occasionally bordering on satire (Mechling, herself a journalist, is well-acquainted with the absurdities of the media industry), there is a profound and wistful melancholy at its core.

Not especially groundbreaking but emotionally astute; a pleasure.