Green-eyed monstress
Three books starring characters to envy
I genuinely forgot the last two Fridays were Fridays. And then for this one, I’m out of town again, so my friend and fellow Substacker
graciously offered to guest post. So before you get into her Riccommendations™, a word about her new newsletter Cocktail Charm. She describes it as “delicious little things to talk about at parties,” but even if you don’t go to a lot of parties (parties? What are those? I stay home and read books!) it is wildly entertaining and brings you a ton of great stuff from the internet and beyond to think about, talk about, and snort with laughter about. Here’s this week’s issue. Enjoy!Now, the words of Gabby. See you next time. — Susan
Shortly after I graduated college, I took to reading a new column I liked very much from my favorite magazine. You know that science that says we’ll spend our lives latched on to music from our formative years? This column imprinted on me like an album I’d have bought on iTunes, loaded on a CD disk, and driven around to all summer in suburban New Jersey.
I Like This Bitch’s Life ran essays on lifestyle bloggers who use aspiration as currency — and begrudgingly admitted their game was working. It introduced me to baker-bloggers who marzipanned mousse cakes and Instagram florists with effortless spills of ranunculus bundles, then pulled me along to vaster vectors of envy: self-decapitating sea slugs, $200 wooden spoons, Jeffrey Garten. I liked liking these bitches’ lives, all crisp white button-downs and telegenic tablescapes, glittering days shrugged off with sprezzatura.
I’m not much of a hater by nature. But there is something to be said about the head rush brought on by lust: the exuberant egging-on of aspiration, the fantasy that a life really could be like that. So why relegate all the fun to lifestyle influencers, anyway? Why not find the exhilaration of envy in novels, too? Today, we present three characters whose lives I’m deeply, luxuriantly, ecstatically jealous of.
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🇷🇺 Absurdistan
Gary Shteyngart, 2006
Misha Vainberg is a corpulent, flaccid failson, the sole offspring of Russia’s 1,238th-richest mob czar. His hobbies are plentiful: rapping Pusha T over plates of sturgeon kebab, dialing up his psychopharmacologist for quick-hit prescriptions, and striking his manservant, Timofey, with his squishy hands. He’s incandescently grotesque, this wretched Russian wannabe oligangster. But despite his riches, Misha longs — oh, how he longs! — for the one thing he can’t have: America, where his brash, whale-tailed Bronx sugar baby ambivalently awaits him.
Although he attended New York’s Accidental College, Misha is barred from reentering the US thanks to his father’s crimes. When dear Daddy is assassinated, leaving the flailing failson orphaned and despondent, Misha decides he must break his exile at any cost — by diverting through Absurdsvanï, the oil-swollen Soviet nation where he aims to extract an American visa.
I will be honest: if you’re going to read the great Gary Shteyngart, I do think you should start with Our Country Friends. But hulking, sulking Mishka is a propulsive narrator, lyrical and raucous and entirely unaware he is the funniest person to roam the Earth. Plus, he has drivers, house staff, COMPOUNDS!
How much do I like their life? Oh god, so much. A lifetime of Baltic Sea fish and smutty money? Forget America. Misha, stay by the sea. Pour sturgeon and vodka down your quivering gullet. I’ll refill our glasses as the sun sets.
Green-eyed ranking: 6.5/10
🌊 Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff, 2016
Shh, I already presented this book as a bonus recommendation last year (and Susan hates it!) [I do hate it, but please note, I love Groff’s other two novels so much (see EELS: Who can even remember that long ago?) — Ed.]. But who could inspire more envy than lush, leonine Lotto Satterwhite — Lotto being short for Lancelot, the literal knight-hero prancing around Camelot? By the time he’s a young man, Lotto is on the precipice of becoming a globally-lauded playwright, accompanied in all things with his alluring, enigmatic wife Mathilde. “For now, he's the one we can't look away from. He is the shining one,” Groff writes in her prologue.
We’ll learn later that Lotto is kind of an oaf, and the one to watch is elusive Mathilde lurking around the edges. But what’s so appealing about ole Lancelot is just how simply he accepts the steady arrival of trophies and successes in his life, and how little he questions how they came to his doorstep. He’s a fabulous epic hero, and an oblivious one at that. And in the dark recesses of my mind, when I’m crippled by my own sense of imposterism or mediocrity, I ask: wouldn’t it be nice, to be a beautiful fool like this?
How much do I like their life? Oh, verily. Let me be golden, happy, and stupid.
Green-eyed ranking: 8/10
🔎 The Hidden Staircase
Carolyn Keene, 1930
This list could never be complete without Nancy Drew, hobby investigator, girl detective, and heroine of my most treasured series as a child. Nancy’s flanked by friends who firmly know their place as side characters, her winsome beta boyfriend Ned, and a hell of a baby-blue Mustang convertible. She zips around town solving crimes with a pocketbook and survives a lot of blows to the skull in the process. Aspiration at its finest! Drewheads, assemble!
A few years ago, I came across a stack of the signature yellow-spined books at my favorite used bookstore. By then, my childhood collection had long been given away. Should I dare, I wondered, crack one open to see if magic was still tucked inside — and risk razing my childhood memories if it wasn’t? We are, after all, talking about a blond-haired, blue-eyed pretty-girl protagonist of the 1930s; Nancy might turn out to be dreadfully retrograde in 2024. I chose the second book and walked to the checkout.
Reader, I could have married her. Nancy is as capacious, as intrepid, and even more aggressively competent than I recalled while she investigates a strange maybe-ghost in a rich old friend’s rich old aunt’s mansion. Because it’s an early book, boyfriend Ned and sidekicks Bess and George don’t exist yet in our gal detective’s universe. But we know we came here — we only came here — for Nancy.
How much do I like their life? Nancy is merely the person I want to be most in this world.
Green-eyed ranking: 45/10
And now, a thing to say
Susan here. If you’re into books, you’re probably aware of the New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list that was cleverly released, 20 books at a time, this month.
Oh man, did I engage! I got mad about some inclusions and excited about some others. Indignant that some books were lower than other books, LOLed at methodology — there’s just no actual scientific way to do lists like these (but let me tell you, I’d start by not pitting nonfiction against fiction).
But if you got sucked in as you were meant to do, tallied up your books, saw others’ tallies, and felt lesser-than, let me remind you that literally none of these judges have read all 100 of these books. And none of them liked all of the ones they see on the list. Plus, recency bias is a real thing — if this list were made 100 years from now about the last 25 years, it would look a lot different. (Here’s a great follow-up list by Lit Hub.)
Reading is personal! Read whatever you want at the frequency you like! Anyway, off to go read some Rolling Stone best album list and get mad about it. See you soon!
That was the forty-seventh EELS! As always, send any and all questions, feedback, and shouted book recommendations by hitting reply.
📚 Susan, with a whole lot of thanks to Gabriela
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I, too, hated Fates and Furies, Susan, but love Groff's other books thereafter - Florida, Matrix, The Vaster Wilds (that last one A+++++++)