When the help starts helping itself
A debut novelist draws on her nannying past for a story of obsession across the New York class divide.
Devotion is an accomplished addition to the sub-genre of books about obsessive friendships between young women of different social classes – friendships riddled with envy and teetering towards some sort of violence.
Although recent books in this sub-genre, such as Tara Isobella Burton’s Social Creature, are compelling enough, there can be something predictable in the posh girl/poor girl dynamic. The poor-mouse friend is a deceitful parasite and the glamorous, gilded one is hollow inside.
Though subtle and layered in many ways,
Devotion, Madeline Stevens’ debut novel, doesn’t stray far from this formula. Still, there’s nothing wrong with the use of predictable elements if they work, and they do here.
The set-up is that poor, friendless Ella, originally from Oregon, is hired as a nanny by beautiful, idle New York mother Lonnie for her baby, William. Both women are 26.
Nannying could almost be a sub-genre of its own by now, but the author is more qualified to write about it than most – from a working-class background in Oregon, Stevens was so burdened with student debt after finishing at Columbia that she nannied for New York’s wealthy for many years after graduation.
Protagonist Ella immediately becomes fascinated by Lonnie. She snoops and steals, reading Lonnie’s diary and pocketing personal items, such as photographs, and, creepily, a baby tooth of Lonnie’s she finds in an old jewellery box. She discovers that Lonnie’s husband has a dark side and that Lonnie is having an affair with one of the couple’s friends. She tries to seduce the friend, too.
Meanwhile, her hardscrabble life outside the plush apartment worsens when her flat is burgled and savings stolen. She wanders the streets at night, obsessed with a nearby house where a serial killer had lived.
Back at work, Lonnie takes her to a writers’ retreat in the Adirondacks where they drink copiously, use a ouija board and swim in the lake.
Ella’s feelings towards Lonnie intensify; she wants both to possess her and to be her. Lonnie’s feelings towards Ella are harder to figure: dependence, some pity, admiration.
It all comes to a head later that summer in a brutal and confronting scene when the family, Lonnie’s lover and Ella go to the Hamptons for a holiday.
None of the characters is likeable, but they are believable. Stevens is deft and deadly in evoking the pitiless grind of being young and poor in New York, and the soul-sapping effect of being smack up against the extreme wealth and idleness of other people who are the same age as you.
Poverty and wealth, both corrupt here.
None of the characters is likeable, but they are believable. Stevens is deft in evoking the pitiless grind of being young and poor in New York.
l DEVOTION, by Madeline Stevens (Faber Fiction, $32.99)