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Stephanie Wambugu’s uncommonly elegant debut novel opens on a note of deflated celebration. The narrator, Ruth, is gathered around her birthday cake with her husband, friends, and neighbors, but her friend Maria, who taught Ruth that “without an obsession life was impossible,” is missing from the packed room. “I’d forgotten,” Ruth thinks. “Now, I remembered.” A painter born to emotionally distant Kenyan immigrants, Ruth’s baseline skews polite and well-behaved, so instead of making this “epiphany” heard, she stifles it, feigning contentment and making conversation with her mentor. In the following days, multiple people ask her if she’s okay. At her New York art opening, where she meets up with her “husband and other strangers,” she drunkenly mistakes one of them for Maria. Despite the night’s success — all her paintings sell — she ditches the after-party and passes out alone in her hotel room. “I started the story from the beginning before falling asleep,” she says.
Lonely Crowds unfolds as a coming-of-age story with whiffs of Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Elena Ferrante. The scope is ambitious; Wambugu, who is also an editor at Joyland Magazine and shares her Kenyan origins with Ruth, follows the friends from their childhood in Providence attending a mostly white Catholic school into their early adulthood in ’90s New York City. Ruth is 9 years old and entering the third grade when she first glimpses Maria, a poor Black girl from Panama who, after losing her bipolar mother to suicide, is living with her aunt who suffers from the same condition. For Ruth, it’s destiny at first sight: “I had been nervous about the new school, and knowing that Maria awaited me had transformed my anxieties into pure interest,” she thinks. “All we needed to do was see one another again and our lives would begin.” She isn’t wrong. At school, they are drawn to each other and Maria soon spends most days at Ruth’s home.
According to Ruth, Maria is the brilliant one. She has the talent, wit, and confidence that Ruth dreams of, and it occasionally gets her into trouble. Even as a young girl, Maria is the initiator, far more familiar with the world of adults. She has a relationship with their music teacher that can only be read as inappropriate even though no explicit revelation ever comes. “I often listened without understanding, hoping someone would enlighten me,” says Ruth, who is happy to live in Maria’s shadow. “I wasn’t sure if awareness would come with age or if I was just dull.” The two share a physical space — Ruth’s bed, bathtubs, clothes — and later, dreams of upward mobility. What Maria wants, Ruth learns to want; Maria poses for Ruth’s drawings and tells her they’ll both go to art school.
Any woman who has experienced deep friendship with another knows it’s complicated. With time, it only gets worse. You get stuck in the same stories, with the same roles. You know each other so well that the weight of what goes unsaid over the years eventually makes it near impossible to be honest. Love becomes envy and turns into resentment, and the person who loves you most also knows how best to wound you. Lonely Crowds lives in the margins of desire and jealousy, intimacy and individuation, certainty and ambivalence. But it’s most interested in that tantalizing, agonizing ambiguity that young queer girls can share between friendship and romantic love.
Once Ruth and Maria arrive at Bard, the two friends start to go their own ways, and their new distance makes their less frequent interactions increasingly charged. Ruth’s obsession with Maria becomes complicated by her physical desire for her — which surprises her each time it surfaces in a touch or a prick of jealousy. While Maria comes out as a lesbian and settles into a relationship with a wealthy girl who picks up on some kind of vibe between the friends, Ruth dallies with a moody English boy and has her first awkward same-sex experience. But even after Maria initiates sex with Ruth, things between them remain unclear. Is Ruth a repressed lesbian, like Maria claims? Is Maria bipolar, like her mother and aunt were? Does Ruth have romantic feelings for Maria? And does Maria return them?
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Much of the novel’s power comes from its unanswered questions, which are allowed to remain unresolved in part because Ruth is a remote and unflappable narrator, giving the fine-tuned appearance of being direct without actually revealing much of what she wants. Ruth’s nonchalance often comes encased in a delightful deadpan. When assigned to read Three Lives at Bard, Ruth says, “I had never heard of Gertrude Stein before and was interested to learn she had lived in Paris, slept with women, and repeated herself a great deal. That sounded like an interesting life and indeed the book had been interesting, more than interesting.” Despite experiencing “nothing short of rapture” reading Stein — a famously gay woman — she sits silently in class. “If I spoke,” she explains, “I risked saying not only to others, but to myself, what I had denied without even knowing I had denied it.” What she has denied knowing, she doesn’t tell us. Ruth’s supposed reliability is often leveraged to hide deeper truths, especially from herself.
The echoes with the My Brilliant Friend quartet, which is built on a frame narrative establishing the non-narrating friend’s disappearance, are unmissable. Though Wambugu’s spin is explicitly queer, Black, and focused on first-generation immigrants, the dynamic each book explores feels just as alive between fledging visual artists in New York City in the ’90s as it does between aspiring writers on the poor outskirts of Naples in the ’50s. Wambugu’s prose has a propulsive, almost hypnotic drive, and she knows how to keep it moving, getting through about as much time in one book as Ferrante does in three. At times, that flow comes at the expense of physical or sensorial detail; we only know that Ruth and Maria look alike because a few people mention it in passing. Like everything we learn about these characters, their likenesses and differences are funneled through Ruth’s perspective, which in time reveals itself to be more limited than we may have initially suspected.
The only problem with this whole equation is that Maria seems like a pretty shit friend. The novel tends to treat Ruth’s desire to stick with her as a given, relying on how identifiable this dynamic is without making Maria feel like a whole person. While those familiar with the tumult of a close female friendship can use Maria as a placeholder for their own more brilliant demons, a reader of the genre can’t help but miss Lila, who pushes Lenù to become the best writer she could despite her cutting comments, her cunning. Lila is mesmerizing precisely because she is frightening, vivifying the girls’ drab childhood. With such a formidable precedent, you can’t help but ask, is Maria ruthless enough? And is she as brilliant, as bold, as superior as Ruth would have us believe?
Objects of obsession are always standing in for what we want them to be, and Lonely Crowds is a thrilling and capacious novel about intimacy and art-making in which the narrator proves to be more compelling than her muse. Even if I wanted to be as infatuated with Maria as Ruth is, the book is seductive, so much so that I almost forgot Maria’s initial absence. Wambugu delivers on that mystery with a gutting final encounter that’s both shocking and inevitable, true to the melancholy that underpins Ruth’s whole story. Even her happiest memory — an evening lying on the campus lawn, carefree and absinthe-drunk with Maria and their friends — is punctured by impending loss: “I longed for it before it was over.”
