Review of Other People’s Pleasure by Harriet Lane – A darkly comic tale of envy and revenge in the Insta Age | imaginary

HeyOf all the Seven Deadly Sins, envy is the last to be commodified. You can understand why – unlike lust, anger, or even laziness, it’s not something that needs to be acknowledged. In his allegory of Venus and Cupid, Bronzino depicted Envy as an ugly green hag, holding her head and howling helplessly; Now Instagram allows anyone online to access photos of the lifestyles of those richer, more beautiful, and more fortunate than us.

Ruth, the narrator of Harriet Lane’s third novel, The Pleasure of Others, is eroded by it. Alone, her marriage over, her daughter grown and her freelance work as boring as it is low-paid, she is the most dangerous of characters: a neglected middle-aged woman with nothing to lose. When she bumps into the beautiful, stupid, and lovable Sookie at a school reunion, she reconnects with her teenage self “and all her violent desires.” Having flown under the radar as a schoolgirl, only noticed by Suki because she lent her her essays, she perfectly remembers the petty insults she was subjected to, now amplified by the fact that she can chase the “best lives” of her contemporaries on social media, while almost none of them remember her.

Ruth tells us: “Are they rife with cunning, or do they lack it altogether? I’m never sure. Here they are, ceaselessly insisting on the reality of their existence, imagining that someone might care about their dog, their children’s exam results, the Spanish drawer, the blackberry strainer on a wooden kitchen table… I’m lurking. I’m the audience, transfixed, eyes gleaming in the dark. After all, if someone wants to be seen, someone else has to watch.”

Lane’s previous two novels, Alys and Always and Her, were elegant psychological thrillers about a toxic fascination between two women, one of whom is wealthier and seems more developed than her intelligent but downtrodden character. It’s the kind of fiction that Patricia Highsmith, or Zoe Heller, excelled at in Notes on a Scandal, a subgenre to which Lean added layers of rage at being poor, powerless, and almost invisible to more fortunate people.

In “Other People’s Pleasure,” the prevailing mood is black comedy rather than menace. Ruth and Sookie are former contemporaries at a small public school whose liberal spirit and complacent narcissism are reminiscent of Bedales (where Len was a pupil). Decades later, the beautiful people who once struggled with eating disorders and kleptomania now have business empires that include “mindfulness festivals, forest bathing, organic skincare, and a wellness podcast.” The only luxuries Ruth has are those she shoplifts or steals from Sookie. Desperate to be seen, she is like Anita Bruckner’s heroine on steroids. The clash between her disaffected, sarcastic wit and Sookie’s online self-satisfaction is intensely uncomfortable, especially when Ruth realizes that what her “friend” really wants is support for an affair with her charismatic former teacher, Waxham, whom they both had crushes on as teenagers.

Of course, Ruth offers Sookie her modest home in an unfashionable part of north London as a place to experiment, and of course things will go horribly wrong. The Magic of Other People’s Pleasure is less a plot than a disturbing portrait of stalking and manipulation. Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that Iago in Othello had a “malignant tumor without motive” in his desire to destroy the noble Moor; Ruth’s envious hatred is, she says, “all I have in the tank now.” Not that there is anything morally superior about its purpose. The contrast between the luxuries that Sookie takes for granted and the narrator’s struggle to survive as a low-paid translator for German marketing copy takes us back to boarding school, where “we stumbled endlessly together like stones at the bottom of the sea. Some of us had our corners smashed, but some of us developed sharp flint edges.”

The best comedy is heightened by pain, and what Lynn points out in her sharp narration is something that has very modern resonance as the world of the haves and have-nots becomes increasingly polarized and toxic. When Ruth gets her revenge, it’s as bad as it is perfect. And I’m afraid you’ll howl with relief.