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3 hours ago
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Of all the seven deadly sins, envy is the last to be commodified. You can understand why – unlike lust, anger or even sloth, it’s not something to admit to. In his Allegory with Venus and Cupid, Bronzino depicted envy as an ugly green hag, clutching her head and howling impotently; now Instagram has allowed anyone online to gain access to images of the lifestyles of those richer, prettier and luckier than ourselves.
Ruth, the narrator of Harriet Lane’s third novel, Other People’s Fun, is corroded by it. Alone, her marriage over, her daughter grown and her freelance work as dull as it is low paid, she is that most dangerous of characters: an overlooked middle-aged woman with nothing to lose. When she bumps into beautiful, stupid and entitled Sookie at a school reunion, she reconnects with her teenage self “and all her violent desires”. Having flown under the radar as a pupil, noticed by Sookie only because she lent her her essays, she has perfect recall of her own petty humiliations, now amplified by the fact that she can stalk her contemporaries’ “best lives” on social media, while almost none of them remember her.
“Are they spilling over with guile, or entirely lacking it? I am never sure. There they are, ceaselessly insisting on the fact of their existence, imagining someone might give a fuck about their dog, their children’s exam results, the Spanish Steps, a colander of blackberries on a wooden kitchen table … I lurk. I am the audience, transfixed, eyes shining in the darkness. After all, if someone wants to be seen, someone else must watch,” Ruth tells us.
Lane’s two previous novels, Alys, Always and Her, were elegant psychological thrillers revolving around toxic fascination between two women, one wealthier and seemingly more sophisticated than her intelligent but downtrodden foil. It’s the kind of fiction that Patricia Highsmith excelled at, or Zoë Heller in Notes on a Scandal, and a subgenre to which Lane has added layers of rage at being poor, powerless and almost invisible to the more fortunate.
In Other People’s Fun, the prevailing mood is one of black comedy rather than menace. Ruth and Sookie are former contemporaries at a minor public school whose liberal ethos and complacent narcissism are reminiscent of Bedales (where Lane was a pupil). Decades later, the pretty people who once had eating disorders and kleptomania now own business empires which encompass “mindfulness festivals, forest bathing, organic skincare and a wellbeing podcast”. The only luxuries Ruth has are those that she shoplifts or steals from Sookie. Desperate to be seen, she’s like an Anita Brookner heroine on steroids. The clash between her resentful, sardonic intelligence and Sookie’s online self-satisfaction is deliciously uncomfortable, especially once Ruth realises that what her “friend” really wants is support to have an affair with their charismatic former teacher, Waxham, whom they both had a crush on as teenagers.
Of course, Ruth offers Sookie her modest home in an unfashionable part of north London as a trysting place, and of course it will all go very wrong. The fascination of Other People’s Fun is less its plot than its queasy portrait of stalking and manipulation. Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that Iago in Othello had “motiveless malignancy” in his desire to destroy the noble Moor; Ruth’s envious hatred is, as she says, “all I’ve got in the tank right now”. Not that there is anything morally superior about her target. The contrast between the luxuries that Sookie takes for granted and our narrator’s struggle to survive as a low-paid translator of German marketing copy goes all the way back to boarding school, where “we were endlessly tumbled together like stones at the bottom of the sea. It knocked the corners off some of us, but some of us developed flint-sharp edges.”
The best comedy is sharpened by pain, and what Lane has pinpointed in her flint-sharp novel is something that has a highly modern resonance as the world of the haves and have-nots becomes increasingly polarised and toxic. When Ruth gets her revenge, it is as nasty as it is total. You will, I fear, howl with satisfaction.
