Manic Pixie Dream Bestie

On Stephanie Wambugu’s ‘Lonely Crowds’

Helen Frankenthaler, 1969, Photograph, Ernst Haas/Getty Images

“There was no question that we would immediately connect and fuse together, becoming inseparable,” thinks Ruth, the narrator of Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel Lonely Crowds, while running into a new classmate at the grocery store. She’s right. Her friendship with the classmate, Maria, leads to decades of inseparability. First at Catholic school (where they are two of the only Black girls), then Bard College (where they are two of the only Black girls), and, finally, in the New York art scene (where they are two of the only Black girls). Maria is brash, ambitious, callous. Ruth is shy, indecisive, sensitive. There is both the solace of sameness and the attraction of opposites. The friendship is irresistible and, ultimately, terrible. The book is neither.

Ruth is a Kenyan American growing up poor in Rhode Island. Her parents work hard, humiliating jobs. At one point, her father makes $12 an hour “working at a laboratory that ran tests on urine samples.” At another, her mother is caretaking for “an elderly couple down the road who loved pudding, the five o’clock news, and racial epithets.” These are not people with a life outside of work. Of her father: “He spent decades working and eating and keeping things to himself.” Of her mother: “I never witnessed her do anything with a drop of enthusiasm in my life, except shop.” Home life is dull; school doesn’t offer much of a reprieve. In one of the novel’s more memorable scenes, Ruth’s class attends a sermon where they are told to consider repenting for lost virginity. They are 9 years old.

Maria gives Ruth the opposite message: “There isn’t anyone watching. We can do whatever we want to do.” Maria has no parents (dead bipolar mom, living deadbeat dad), no after-school plans, no boundaries, and no other friends. She’s up for anything and she’s happy to take Ruth along for the ride. Even Ruth’s exhausted parents like Maria — they let her stay for dinner every night. She’s the ultimate manic pixie dream bestie. Until she’s not.

“When we go to school, we have to go our own way . . . . We don’t have to be together all the time. We can still be close and be . . . separate,” Maria says. At Bard, where they both study art, suddenly everyone around them doesn’t seem so terrible. Maria is excited to make new friends. She even comes out as a lesbian and starts to experience a different kind of closeness with other women. Maria sees these new social (and sexual) opportunities as a blessing; Ruth sees them as a curse. She claims to have “accepted that Maria had relationships that I didn’t understand, friends I didn’t know,” but she never does. Nor does she really make any effort to find other friends, just making do with less and less Maria — until boys notice her.

Ruth’s first boyfriend is James, a handsome Black boy in her art class who is extremely critical of her work. He says things like “It’s a phase every painter has to go through, the bad social commentary” and “the choices, they feel arbitrary.” He’s a bright spot in the novel, a welcome intermission from Ruth and Maria’s pas de deux. He’s also the first person in Ruth’s life to get wise to Maria. “She doesn’t seem to make you a priority in the way you prioritize her.” And, in a moment of utter clarity: “When you end up alone because you’ve let Maria come before everyone else, blame yourself.” But James has his own demons. After a sexless, Marxism-heavy relationship, he steals some money from Ruth and dumps her via emailed suicide note.

The relationship may have failed, but James succeeds at getting a rise out of Maria. “He thinks he’s so fucking tortured,” she says, and, “Ruth, you’re obviously a lesbian.” (A statement that contrasts humorously with James’ similarly self-serving view: “Maria. Lesbian until graduation, isn’t it?") Finally, desperately, Maria initiates some abortive lesbian sex with Ruth. It proves confusing and unsatisfying. They swear to forget about it and, platonically, move to New York as roommates to try to make it big as artists. This final New York section is where a glaring issue becomes apparent: Wambugu is not interested in the period and profession she’s chosen for her duo.

You may not have realized it from the above summary of the first two-thirds of the plot, but this book is set in the ’90s. Which is bizarre, since Wambugu was born in 1998 and, like Ruth, is a Kenyan American from Rhode Island who went to Bard. This is a novel rooted in her own experiences. So why the disjunctive time choice? Whatever the reason, Wambugu certainly didn’t do much research. She barely refers to the period setting in the novel. At one point someone says, “I do something called e-commerce — have you ever heard of it? It’s new.” Ruth recalls, “Adderall was very new those days.” And in one scene a cell phone is treated as a novelty. That’s about it. The last section, set in the New York art world of the ’90s, could have taken place in downtown Copenhagen a year ago. Wambugu portrays the present day minus texting and social media and calls it the ’90s. It’s an inexplicable, lazy choice and embarrasses the book.

In a similar vein, this is a novel about art and artists without any insightful depictions of art-making or descriptions of art. We don’t get a sense of why Maria and Ruth are artists, what art means to them, or what their art is like. Ruth is serious; she does portraits. Maria is a hack; she does video art. That’s about it. Here’s one of the handful sentences about art: “Moser's paintings hung on the wall: large, desolate, kind of ironic landscapes with purple skies and white sand, clear horizons and virgin forests.” It’s a banal description when an incisive one is needed. No discussion of perspective or brush strokes. And what painter has such a simplistic view of color? I kept waiting for ruminations about art or long scenes of painting; all I ever got were asides about politics (“It was a very good time to be an African artist, my gallerist explained”). I suspect Wambugu could have written more engagingly about two best friends who wanted to be writers.

On the other hand, maybe not. The problem, I suspect, lies in Ruth’s utter indifference. Her narration is laconic to the point that it’s difficult to imagine her pursuing anything, much less something competitive and intensive like fine art (nor is it exactly a voice that fills a reader with interest). Because the style tends toward minimalism, you initially imagine the prose is reflecting profound inhibition, but whenever she attempts a longer description it becomes clear: Ruth is profoundly uninterested in the world around her. Take, for example, this description of Bard College, considered one of the most architecturally significant campuses in the country: “The campus was idyllic in all the ways one might expect. It was true to the brochure: the manicured shrubs and immaculate stone walls and gardens for being contemplative in, the bicycle paths cut into the hills.” That could describe any school. Where are Robert Venturi, Rafael Viñoly, Frank Gehry? Wouldn’t an artist care?

This apathy is intended as a feature of the book, a way of showing Ruth’s singular interest in Maria. (We are told on the first page, “There has to be something or someone that comes first at the expense of everything else, otherwise there isn’t any point.”) Instead of a carefully worked-out prose style matched to the apathetic mind, I suspect that Wambugu, who is an editor at Joyland Magazine, decided to delete most of her descriptions. Which would make sense because, frankly, what’s left isn’t very good. “The weather was mild and by all accounts it was a beautiful day.” Whose accounts? Was there a survey? Of a speaker: “her voice unconvincingly warm but beneath the surface frigid.” That’s just the same description put two different ways. “Spring was at its sad climax.” What does that mean? She describes “a tree with weeping branches” (a weeping willow, perhaps?) and “long broccoli that were like tall grass” (just an uninteresting, ineffective comparison). The worst descriptor of all is, of course, the title, which is either an oblique reference to the Reisman et al. classic of postwar sociology, The Lonely Crowd, or completely inexplicable.

In fairness, there are two lovely descriptions in Lonely Crowds. Of “Don’t Explain” by Billie Holiday: “It’s a sad, defeated song, a song about looking the other way, about being unable to bear knowing what is already obvious.” Of a childhood trip: “Those were my memories of Kenya: the Kotex, the sickly sweet orange soda, the blue bathroom tile. That was all. Not a country so much as a small hotel room.” I wish the whole book read like those two lines.

I’ve read and reviewed offensively, humorously bad books; Lonely Crowds is not one. It’s decent, which, frankly, is worse. Wambugu doesn’t take the kind of gonzo creative risks that allow you to write something truly bad (or truly good); instead, she’s written something very safe and very boring. Ruth may be lonely, but the book is certainly not crowded: it’s 300 pages that feel like 600, a novel that could have been a couple of short stories.

Gideon Leek is a writer based in Brooklyn. His essays, reviews, and fiction have appeared in The Village Voice, Liberties, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Domain Review, Cleveland Review of Books, and Oxford Review of Books. Follow him on Twitter @gideon_leek.