A novel of ideas, laced with arsenic
“When I lie at night,” a character in the novel confesses, “I can’t help but wish this human suit came with a zipper, that I could hang in my closet with the Chanel spotlights and take a break for myself, even for an hour.”
In the same passage, she bays: “They should list impaired hearing as a side effect on the bottle of fame. There are so many people clapping for you all the time ... for walking, for breathing, for wiping your own ass, that it drowns out what I like to call your not that inner voice, the one that says you’re not that smart, you’re not that talented, you’re not that funny. Some may confuse this gag for progress, as women come out of the womb hearing we are not enough. But having been on both sides of the fence I can tell you this: if you don’t hate yourself just a little bit, you are intolerable.”
Welcome to “The Favorite Sister” by Jessica Knoll, the season’s most tamarind-dark work of fiction. If you were in the market for a book that’s the flip side, tonally, of those good-vibes quotes ubiquitous on Instagram — you know, those motivational missives posted over pictures of sunsets or rolling fields — then this one’s for you.
Delving into the world of pop culture — a whodunit centred on five women, two of them sisters, who star on a reality show called Goal Diggers, until one of them winds up RIP — it is that uniquely subversive thing: a Magnum ice cream bar of a book that is actually a novel of ideas, laced with arsenic.
Even the lies have lies. It’s just that kind of story.
At one point, one of the voices in the book points out — re: the split-screen between the real her and the “her” on the show — that “the closer you get to believing your own lies, the more palatable they become for mass consumption.”
Exactly how much was culled from actual TV fare? Only the L.A.-based Knoll knows for sure, but for students of the Real Housewives juggernaut it’s hard not to infer from two of the characters the long-going narrative of Kyle and Kim Richards, the very complicated relationship of two Paris Hilton aunts from “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”
It’s also impossible not to glean quite a bit from the slow carcrash of a friendship that was Topic A in the early seasons of “Real Housewives of New York.”
Knoll, a reality TV junkie, admits as much in an interview. “I went back and watched the first season of “Real Housewives of New York” and I remembered the Jill and Bethenny feud and how heartbreaking that was … I could borrow some of the emotions from this and use it as a template.”
Likewise, “I also remember watching an episode of (”The Real Housewives of Orange County”), and they go to Ireland for their trip and they all gang up on this one housewife, and it was so heated that I had this thought that this woman could open a window and jump out of the bus and I wouldn’t be surprised ... I realized that line is so thin to cross into homicidal violence.”
Knoll, whose last book was the super seller “The Luckiest Girl Alive” — currently being adapted by Reese Witherspoon — tinkers with the m.o. of Housewives in her latest, making the women in her fictional show younger, adding a dose of lesbian drama, a touch of racial politics, not to mention some spiky commentary on the “wellness” movement.
The specificities of the tribe? Pretty bang-on. These are women who sport Aquazzura wedges and bask in hydra-facials, drinking shots of Casamigos while going about recruiting affections like it’s a “pyramid scheme.”
The starting point for it all? “These women with these socalled glamorous lives that are maybe shallow on the surface,” Knoll says.
“But women’s interior lives are so rich, just rife with angst and tension and rage. And we’re so good at putting on a face and saying, ‘My life is perfect,’ and I’m very interested in people becoming unravelled from that place.”
Reality show or not, the novel is also great at exhibiting the particular pang of female friendships gone wrong: losing one friend, a narrator confides at one point, is “like having a stroke and having to relearn how to walk, which hand is left and which hand is right.”
It’s all something that comes from a deep place for Knoll.
Then there are the particulars of shooting in a way that everything is not so much unreal as it is heightened reality, like the producer who sends Cliffs Notes type text messages to a cast member before she goes to meet another. “We shoot out of order,” the narrator in this case shares, “sometimes filming a coffee date after a big blowout between two of the cast members to ‘set up’ the confrontation, which will appear to have taken place later in the hour on your television.”
The texts are reminders, because in reality, you may have talked about a million other things since then, some on camera and some off.
Confusing? Sure. But the contrived nature of these shows is, in some ways, a corollary to real-life social situations, even families, in which people start playing a part in the tribe, but eventually the part becomes them. Who can tell the diff ?
It’s like that old Oscar Wilde quote: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s options, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
Knoll readily unhooks a more expansive take on womanhood, reminiscent of other novels about “difficult women,” like Margaret Atwood’s “The Robber Bride” or Zoe Heller’s “Notes on a Scandal,” reminders that women are not one thing — and, hey, it ain’t always pretty.
Starting with the revelation of the murder in Chapter 1 and then going back in time through alternating viewpoints, “The Favorite Sister” comes down ultimately to one thing a character stops to inform. “In my wildest dreams I never would have imagined that the fight would become real, and the friendship the charade.”