Prosperous Friends is a beautifully painted picture of a very ugly couple. The ugliness isn't physical. In fact, Ned and Isabel Bourne are both attractive; they are young, they are writers, they are of indeterminate means and they travel the world. But the Bournes' outwardly glamorous life is rotted--beautifully, elegantly, descriptively rotted--by their yawning emotional emptiness and destructive disregard for one another.
The progressively nasty implosion of the Bournes' marriage is presented by Christine Schutt (All Souls), an author known for the strange poetry and intimacy of her writing. In her hands, what could have been a frankly tiresome novel about self-involved, self-loathing, undeservedly affluent people and the ways they hurt each other daily becomes a compelling, almost voyeuristic, study of two complicated relationships.
The second, older couple is Clive and Dinah Harris, who grant the Bournes use of their empty house in coastal Maine. Clive is a celebrated, arrogant painter with whom Isabel has had a strange and unsatisfying affair; Dinah is a poet who, in all her underappreciated graciousness, may be the book's only appealing character. The four of them seem to lack connection, but Clive and Dinah's marriage appears to work--while Ned and Isabel are just doomed.
Written in a dreamy, fragmented style highlighted by frequent shifts in perspective, this is not a book to read if you seek sympathetic characters or a satisfying, conventional plot. But if you want to get lost in writing rich with ringing, sensual descriptions--and observe superficially successful lives you won't envy--drop in on Prosperous Friends. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice