Friendship

March 10, 2014
Gould’s debut novel follows Bev and Amy as they transition into their 30s and a kind of stilted adulthood. The book opens with Bev on her way to an interview at a temp agency—she has dropped out of grad school before completing her M.F.A. and is stuck in the kind of low-rent existence typical of recent grads. As the novel progresses, Bev finds out she’s pregnant following a one-night stand; meanwhile Amy’s life, which has been insufferably charmed to this point, likewise starts to fall apart. The girls are forced to reevaluate their places in the world and their friendship. Gould’s novel is admirably, readably realistic—she knows these girls and the world they live in (including the omnipresence of technology and the way that it pervades relationships). In places, however, the accuracy of Gould’s prose takes away from the book’s ambition and reach. The plot is least successful when it strives for revelatory connections, as when Sally, a wealthy wife struggling to conceive, is slid conveniently into the narrative like a lucky puzzle piece. Still, Gould nails the complex blend of love, loyalty, and resentment that binds female friends. It is worth reading for the richness of its details (at one point, Amy is overwhelmed by the desire to put an engaged coworker’s wedding ring in her mouth), and it offers new insight into the experience of young women.

Starred review from May 1, 2014
Two young women try to create the glamorous lives they've imagined for themselves while talking on Gchat from their desks at their less-than-ideal jobs. Bev left her cool-sounding but dispiriting entry-level position at a Manhattan publishing house to follow her boyfriend to the Midwest. Bad move. Now she's back in New York, single again, and temping. Amy was once famous for her work at a hot website-or maybe she was just notorious: "[N]ow that she was neither, it mattered less which one it had been." She's been working for three years at Yidster, "the third-most-popular online destination for cultural coverage with a modern Jewish angle," but is basically just floating through life on a diet of clicks and tweets, hoping her boyfriend will move in with her so she'll be able to keep paying the rent on her lovely brownstone apartment in Brooklyn. When Bev gets pregnant on a hilariously dreadful first date, the women are forced to confront their differing dreams and priorities. Plot takes a back seat to Gould's razor-sharp humor and observations about life in New York among a class of young people who know more about how they'd like to live than how to pay for it. It's also a delight to read a novel that places female friendship at its center; we watch Bev and Amy manage their fluctuating feelings of love, jealousy and sometimes disdain for each other. "It seems improbable that this hasn't happened to us before," Amy says when she learns that Bev is pregnant. "Us?" Bev replies. "Are you going to start saying 'we're pregnant'?...We're not a couple, Amy." They're not, but they are, and Gould brilliantly charts their ups and downs.Perfect summer reading for people who'd rather stay in the city than go to the beach.

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June 1, 2014
Best pals Bev and Amy are about to hit 30, and neither woman is where she wants to be. When Bev and Amy met years earlier at a publishing house, their futures were bright. But then Bev followed a guy to Wisconsin only to have him cheat on her, while Amy gained notoriety as a blogger until she pissed off the wrong person and lost her job. Now Bev is temping and living with three roommates, while Amy is halfheartedly working for the Jewish blog Yidster and dating a sexy slacker artist. They're pretty much coasting until Bev has a one-night stand and winds up pregnant. As Bev wrestles with her choices, Amy concocts a plan to persuade Sally, a woman she and Bev house-sat for, to adopt Bev's baby but grows envious when Bev and Sally grow close. Gould follows her essay collection, And the Heart Says . . .Whatever (2010), with a savvy first novel that, in piercing prose, zeroes in on modern ennui and the catalysts that force even the most apathetic out of their complacency.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)