It’s easy to swoon over ‘Modern Lovers’
Emma Straub’s hipsters miss their youthful days
Modern Lovers opens with the meeting of a book club — perhaps a canny move on Emma Straub’s part, seeing as her previous novel, The
Vacationers, was a smash hit with beach-readers and book-clubbers alike. Expect similar greatness from
Modern Lovers (Riverhead, 368 pp., out of four). Though her writing is brisk and easy to read, the humorous insight Straub brings to the page about how everyday lives are lived will make for immersive reading and rich conversation.
The novel follows two couples — Andrew and Elizabeth, and Jane and Zoe — whose lives have been entwined ever since Elizabeth, Andrew and Zoe were in the same band at Oberlin. Decades have gone by since then, with everyone now living in hipster Brooklyn. After Hollywood comes knocking to make a biopic of the glamorous life and tragic death of their former band mate, the old friends begin to feel wistful for the intensity of their earlier lives.
Nostalgia unexpectedly erupts into full-fledged dissatisfaction when Elizabeth and Andrew’s son falls in love with Jane and Zoe’s daughter. “There was nothing about youth that was fair,” observes Andrew, witnessing the rapture of teenage love even as his once-captivating wife bores and irks him, “the young hadn’t done anything to deserve it, and the old hadn’t done anything to drive it away.”
Straub recounts her characters’ yearnings with love and empathy, which makes the book’s wit — and
Modern Lovers is screamingly funny— glow with warmth. The lesbian couple, Jane and Zoe, run a restaurant while their daughter, Ruby, runs circles around boys even as she strikes out in college admissions. Elizabeth, a real estate broker, thinks of Andrew and their son as “soft on the inside, like underbaked cookies.”
Straub brings her insight and good-natured wisdom to them all, so no one feels judged or shortchanged.
Though Straub’s writing is subtle and nimble and brimming with intelligence, on rare occasions the plot twists can feel inau- thentic. Since the most quotidian moments are so compelling, this generally effortless novel can feel stuttering and contrived when she veers into sitcom high jinks (such as Elizabeth recruiting Ruby to spy on her husband, or a police raid of a yoga studio).
Those moments are few and far between, though. What’s most satisfying about Modern Lovers is how it captures the lives of all its characters, young and old, with equal authenticity. The teenagers act like teenagers but are nonetheless allowed wisdom and self- awareness, and though the adults doggedly try to do right by their families, they are allowed their moments of blazing immaturity.
Ultimately, this is a novel about the transition from youth to adulthood. Both turn out to be moving targets, continually needing to be remembered, reimagined, and reassessed. In Elizabeth’s words, “That was what she wanted — to celebrate and mourn her youth simultaneously.”