Pretend We Are Lovely

May 15, 2017
Reid transforms the story of a mentally ill mother setting off the implosion of a tight-knit nuclear family into a sharp-edged portrait of the ways in which each member of the family is shaped by the others, with no villains, only victims. At the heart of the story, set in a Virginia university town in 1982, is food, with which no one in the Sobel family has an uncomplicated relationship. Housewife mom Francie obsesses over calories and spends her days running in both literal and figurative circles. Philosophy professor dad Tate, off in his own apartment after starting an affair with an undergrad, eats raw refrigerated biscuit dough out of the tube. Ten-year-old Enid takes after him, with food an equal source of comfort and shame, while 12-year-old Vivvy, drawn against her will to the boy next door, models herself on her mother. The fifth member of the family is a “fussy, obstinate, compulsive boy” who died seven years earlier in horrific circumstances. He suffered from an illness, the main manifestation of which was an insatiable appetite, and continues to haunt the Sobels. Told in bright shards of chapters from the points of view of the four survivors, the novel never descends into mere case history. Set mostly during a single summer, it reaches a climax during Halloween, that sugar-laden holiday in which boundaries are often broken. As Francie reaches a breaking point, the girls act out in ways that endanger themselves and others. This is a tense, vivid, and sharp novel that captures the complex relationships between the Sobel family members, particularly between sisters Vivvy and Enid.

Starred review from May 15, 2017
In Reid's debut novel, a family must navigate the secret currents of guilt, obsession, loss, and--most dangerous of all--hope in this pitch-perfect examination of two Southern seasons in 1982.Enid, Vivvy, Francie, and Tate are a nuclear family in the most traditional sense of the word. Tate, self-indulgent and perpetually flummoxed, is a professor of philosophy at the nearby college. Francie's mania for precision has found its expression in the micromanagement of her household and her daughters' lives while the two girls, poised on the brink of developing into women, range the lush, brambly suburbia of their childhood with the freedom of a bygone age. However, jutting from the placid surface of their domestic routines, the jagged topography of the family's past threatens to overwhelm both their present and their future. Set seven years after the accidental death of their oldest child, Shelly, the present day of this fever-bright novel of desire and withholding sees Tate and Francie estranged and Francie in the middle of an anorexic episode wherein she has reduced herself to a list of her articulate bones and her "spinning gold ring." Enid, who takes after her father, deals with the stress of her home life by hoarding food, retreating into vividly sensory fugue states wherein she overeats to the point of illness. Vivvy, more like her mother, denies herself and channels her rage, fear, and longing into violence against her surroundings, her sister, herself. As the novel spins toward its climax, Reid intensifies each of the elusive, flickering perceptions of her characters in turn, creating a story that proceeds through a montage of tactile sensory indulgence. In prose that ambulates between stark, hallucinatory, fuddled, and chewy according to the guiding character's point of view, Reid masterfully denies her novel the impulse to solve its characters' problems, leaving the reader with the brutal task of lingering within their experience.

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