Best Friends

In 1973 at Oberlin College, Clare, an Ohio WASP, meets Sally, a Jewish Californian, and the two become best friends. As the women grow closer, soap-opera-like disasters drop like black balloons into their pretty pink lives. The sudden death of Sally's fiancé, multiple failed marriages, molestation, heroin addiction, and the revelation of terrible family secrets are but a few of the challenges facing their friendship. Renée Raudman's sweet, breathy voice is wispy and childlike. Consequently, her women sound fey, fragile, and a bit too precious. By contrast, her male characters sound constricted, as if they have something caught in their throats. While the notion that friendships withstand hard times is worthy, Raudman's narration does little to distract from the novel's tendency toward melodrama. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Starred review from May 28, 2001
First novels that track a pair of friends from college days through their subsequent lives aren't exactly uncommon, but Moody's is so freshly observed and gifted with such a palpable sense of the ravages of time that it feels utterly new. Clare, the narrator, is a prematurely cynical Ohio girl, daughter of a left-wing schoolteacher, who says up-front that all she wanted out of college when she went to Oberlin in 1973 was "unrest and demonstrations." Sally Rose is her roommate, an apparently naïve, sheltered kid from a wealthy Los Angeles family whose occasional sly wit and perfect word choices appeal to Clare. The girls grow close, and soon Clare is making regular visits to the big house off Mulholland Drive where Sid, Sally's indulgent, wise-guy father, seems to cast a spell over a happy household. Sally never questions the source of the family wealth, but inquisitive Clare does—and that is the first of many shocks that unfold as the shadows begin to gather around the Roses. Sally's bright, perky younger brother, Ben, turns into a haunted druggie; their mother, ace cook Esther, becomes increasingly remote; Sid begins a long decline into Alzheimer's. Yet despite their geographical distance, the two girls, Sally going into law of a peculiarly California kind, Clare becoming a hardheaded doctor with a specialty in AIDS, never lose their deep attachment, which somehow sustains them through a darkening landscape. They both suffer their share of unhappy relationships—and here Moody's skills at character drawing, already clear in her portraits of Sid and Ben, take full rein—and both come to rueful realization of their limitations, and those of life itself. Even in its dying fall, however, the book never loses its edge, at once compassionate and humorous, nor its moving conviction that a strong friendship between women can be one of life's most powerful relationships.

February 25, 2008
Moody's popular tale of friendship throughout the years is wonderfully realized by Renee Raudman through her underplayed performance. The bond between Moody and Raudman, having collaborated previously on The Office of Desire, mirrors the touching relationship between the characters of Sally Rose and Clare Mann. Raudman gives each an original, realistic voice while offering an unwavering omniscient narrator. She also summons a variety of accents and dialects for the colorful cast of characters throughout. One gets the sense that Raudman understands Moody's original text so firmly that only she could possibly have read it, thus creating a memorable experience for the listener. A Riverhead paperback (Reviews, May 28, 2001).

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