SIGNIFICANT OTHERS

A makeshift throuple—described from two alternating perspectives—makes for intricate, intimate complications.

More than a decade out of college, Jess and Ren are still roommates, sharing a rescue dog and a house in Hawaii. Jess is the hyper-responsible partner: Raised in alcohol-soaked poverty, she’s determined to maintain economic security at all costs—a likely outcome, given that she majored in business and runs her own real estate firm. Ren, bartender and part-time fitness instructor, has devolved into the child in this dyad. Though the two share expenses (loosely), Ren has grown accustomed to letting Jess attend to all the more taxing, adult routines of cohabitation: cooking, cleaning, etc. Though the two are very close, snuggling and sharing confidences, their relationship has never turned sexual. After a few halfhearted explorations with partners of varying genders, Jess has decided that she’s just not into it. Ren pegs her as not necessarily asexual—“maybe just aromantic.” For her part, Ren is guiltlessly free with her favors. When a drunken night with a visiting botany professor (described just vaguely enough to sound universally attractive) results in pregnancy, Ren, already at loose ends, decides to see it through, and then the professor reappears. Jess, rosily envisioning her role as co-parent, jumps right on board. That’s the setup—before ambivalence seeps in from all sides. The author is a whiz at conveying complex emotions, often with a swift metaphor. When the anxiety-prone Jess suffers a bout of guilt and shame, she recalls the dual emotion as having “blossomed like spores all over [her] body.” The women’s distinctive voices are artfully delineated and come across as fully three-dimensional. It doesn’t hurt that the sex scenes, when they arise, are not only believable but evocative.

This accomplished first novel artfully limns romantic cross-currents in a thoroughly contemporary setting.