Daniel M. Lavery's MEETING NEW PEOPLE: Ten Thoughts

Meeting New People is a novel about “friendship breakups,” or at least that is where it sets out from. Barbara, our narrator, is 57 years old. One night, her friend Susan—“the closest thing I’ve had to a best friend in the last fifteen years”— comes over for dinner, bringing with her a list of Barbara’s faults. Barbara has already cooked a meal for them to share, the smell of which lingers through the next day and intensifies her grief and insomnia. Plus which—and this is a point that Barbara makes to Susan before Susan stalks off forever into the night—they’ve now wasted a perfectly good dinner. You simply cannot hurt Barbara to the point where she stops being practical; it is as natural to her as breathing.

The catalogue-summary and back-of-the-jacket copy of the book make it sound a little like High Fidelity for female friendships. Barbara’s sudden bereavement—and though she gets through it just fine, and she’s hilarious about it throughout, the novel leaves us in no doubt that it was a bereavement—causes her to reexamine her past lost best-friendships, even as she systematically goes in search of a new bestie. This is a reasonable way to try to pin down the novel for marketing purposes, but it is not, thankfully, what the reading experience is like. Barbara does not cold-bloodedly call up a bunch of old best friends and do a weird post-mortem in the way that Rob from High Fidelity does. That was an appropriate plot for a guy in his thirties who collects records: that is how he’d do things, from the top down. In this novel, though, both the reminiscing and the searching arise in a way that feels natural and unstructured.1 It’s just an interesting, fundamentally well-meaning, somewhat rigid aging lady talking about her life, which means that the novel is wholly dependent on “voice.”

That’s risky as hell. When you write a novel that way, you’re exposing yourself to readerly judgments that can’t help but feel personal. You’re saying, I think that my ability to approximate, through written sentences, the unspoken and unwritten sense-of-self and sense-of-what’s-happening of a person who is not me is good enough for an entire novel to ride on. You’re also saying I think this person is fundamentally interesting enough to spend a couple hundred pages with. You risk the following sorts of misreadings: 1) This author thinks this character is a good person, but I notice X, Y, Z ways that they’re not, and so the author must also be morally misshapen in X, Y, Z ways. 2) I bet the author is like this person; how else could the author create this person so convincingly? 3) The author likes people who are boring. But worse, you risk the following sorts of accurate readings: 1) The character does not sound convincing or consistent, which means the author couldn’t keep his ego out of the way, or has deep faults as an imaginer of other people. 2) The character does sound convincing and consistent, but they’re also boring. Since they were born from somewhere within the author, there is a part of the author’s personality that is boring. The idea of submitting myself to such judgments gives me the willies. I would much rather have somebody tell me I can’t construct a plot well.

As a construction, Barbara is seamless. I had the sense that I was listening throughout to the same person, who comes from Daniel Lavery but is not Daniel Lavery. (Lavery is a man and not middle-aged, for starters, and just based on his past writing, I can’t imagine that he shares all of Barbara’s opinions.) Barbara works at a high-end grocery store and is absorbed in the minutiae of her job; Lavery has obviously either held such a job, listened very closely to people who do, or read the right Subreddits. The book largely consists of Barbara’s opinions on minor matters of work, friendship, food, and social life—as she tells us about the interpersonal dramas that constitute the book’s plot, these scenes always trigger a disquisition about how, say, celery is a perfectly fine vegetable that people just don’t know how to slice right, or how millennials want to turn every public space into a Narcan dispensary whether or not junkies ever go there, or how lesbians look down on heterosexual women, or how people who act like pregnancy is the most exciting part of child-rearing are kinda weird, and so on. I am not gonna go reread James Wood’s The Irresponsible Self just for the sake of this one little substack post about an entirely different book, but I think that this book achieves what Wood (IIRC) describes in his account of the comic novel: a character that we enjoy, who has some freedom both from the moral-political vision of the author and that of the reader.

Barbara is neither saint nor monster; she has altruistic urges and selfish ones. Her main fault, as far as the novel’s plot goes, is that she’s a little too rigid. At the beginning of the novel I wondered why she had trouble keeping friends and felt that Susan must be crazy. (Later in the novel Barbara talks about how much cheap sympathy you can generate by telling your side of the story of a friendship breakup to a person who doesn’t know you well, which was a nice touch of self-awareness, since the novel initially gets some of its early momentum from exactly such sympathy.) By the end of the novel I still felt tenderly protective of Barbara, but she had listed so many categories of people who drive her nuts that I also basically grasped that she would probably not be my friend in real life, for one reason or another—you can’t easily approach somebody who sets up this many tripwires.

There was a time in my life when I would have rolled my eyes at the very term “friendship breakup.”

In high school I had a friend who was brilliant, compassionate, and a little unstable. We bonded over our shared love of writing and of Tori Amos. One day, she abruptly stopped being friends with me. Her reasons why weren’t exactly coherent. She wrote a somewhat rambling (but eloquent) list of ways that I had pissed her off without knowing it.2 Since this person was probably my closest friend at that moment, I spent a week or so trying to answer all of her charges specifically, first to her and then to myself. It was hopeless. All my trivial and significant faults had been served up to me at once, in no order, by someone whose opinion of me mattered. All my little adolescent hypocrisies and inconsistencies were massed together and made to look the totality of myself. Whatever case for yourself you plead in your head in a situation like that, you’re going to lose—in your own mind first. Like the narrator of “Araby,” which I hadn’t read yet—it would have saved me some time if I had—I saw myself a creature driven and derided by vanity. I grieved; I grew paranoid. I came to believe that my handful of other friends also secretly didn’t like me. I silently withdrew from everything for a while. (Nobody noticed, which reinforced the impression that my other friendships didn’t really exist.) To this day, when I become friends with brilliant women—I’m an English teacher and a writer, so this is at least 70 percent of my friendships—I have a streak of paranoia, lasting for as long as the friendship does, that they, specifically, secretly hate me, that I will wake up one day to discover I’ve been kicked out of the group chat, or that we will be drinking beer and talking and I will suddenly find myself prophetically denounced, from my balding head to my mutant toes, for reasons that I didn’t anticipate two seconds ago but that, put together, seem simultaneously unfairly totalizing and impossible to refute in detail.

It’s kinda funny that my opinion that “friendship breakups” aren’t real developed years and years after this exerpience.

As I’ve said, I feel tenderly protective of Barbara. And in the same way that she has very strong opinions about food and furniture and small social graces, I, who lack savoir-faire in these areas, have very strong, sometimes friendship-preventing opinions about how to read novels. I know that there is a whole shadow readership out there that considers it already a strike against a novel if the protagonist is a bad or flawed or even just “unlikable” person, readers who want fiction for adults to follow a set of rules that I think only appropriate for children’s books (if the protagonist is bad, they must be punished, etc.). I worry that I, like Barbara, am too rigid in my opinions—if other people want to enjoy fiction in that way, let ‘em, a hundred flowers, etc. But at the same time I worry that many people are thoughtlessly bringing a set of expectations appropriate to their kind of reading to the work of writers who are playing a totally different game, and then filling out, essentially, customer ratings that drag down the overall public reputation of someone who is doing great work of a sort for which those readers are simply not prepared. The Goodreads average rating for this book is 3.39 stars currently, while the Goodreads average rating for Tim Ferris’s The Four-Hour Workweek is 3.9. This suggests to me that my concerns are not entirely misplaced. Some of you idiots can’t read novels for grownups and you should have a little humility about it.

It turns out that this is a religious novel. In her search for community, Barbara hesitantly communes with the local Episcopalians, begins to volunteer, prays just a bit. (There is a secondary character also named Barbara whom Lavery uses so ingeniously during this section of the novel that it just tickled me.) Without coming to believe (yet) in most of the Nicene Creed items that I consider indispensable for an adherent of Christianity—and without even liking Jesus (I suspect she finds him intimidating, as do I)—Barbara begins to ask God to make her less of an asshole in certain situations, and then, when that doesn’t entirely work, she begins to ask God to just sort of carry the situation, her assholery and her desire to be better and the other person’s flaws and needs. (A little bit Charles Williams, this: simply bearing another’s burden precedes every other spiritual change.) And she begins to shift: small, believable changes that suggest the beginning of a real spiritual transformation. “Begin that vast, excruciating change in us,” as an old friend of mine, Josh Hagedorn, once wrote in a liturgy setting (is anybody out there still in touch with Hags? Does he still write? He’s the most talented writer I knew in college, certainly more so than I ever was). This novel depicts the very beginning of a vast, excruciating change, in a character who still feels ambivalent about Jesus. This gave the novel just the tiniest hint of Spark.