Perhaps the biggest irony in Keep Your
Friends Close Lucinda Berry’s psychologically terrifying and bleakly funny
novel is that it begins at a meeting of the West Hollywood Moms’ Club where a
group of rich and powerful wives and mothers get together to drink, indulge in
edibles and bitch about how difficult it is to have their lives. By the time
the reader is nearly halfway through the novel you do understand that these
women’s lives are stressful for many reason but motherhood had nothing to do
with it. In a way the death of Kiersten, the President of the club, may be the
least stressful thing at least three of the women in this club have had to deal
with in a long time: given how sociopathic and self-centered they are this
clearly gives them a break from the tales that they’ve been spinning – most of
all for their own benefit.
I suspect the
setup will remind some readers, as one is so often during the past decade, of Big
Little Lies but there’s a major difference: for all the flaws of the
Monterey Five you never doubted for a moment they loved their children with all
their hearts. By contrast the three women who serve as narrators – Brooke,
Whitney and Jade – spend the novels
essentially viewing their children as appendages more than anything else. They
don’t particularly like each other or even their spouses that much and they really
do seem to see the investigation into their friends death as an inconvenience
more than something horrible. All of them – or at least the three women we meet
– have the emotional depth and empathy of the Roy family and don’t even have
the excuse of being heirs to a media conglomerate to blame.
Now to be fair
Whitney does care – she and Kiersten have been best friends since kindergarten
and have done everything together since – gone to college, got married, had
children together. Whitney finds it impossible to believe that Kiersten’s death
is either an accident or a suicide but
she can’t for the life of her think anyone would want to kill her. Throughout
the novel Whitney cares about the death of Kiersten because she knew her better
than anyone to the point that she shafts aside anyone else who tries to help
her.
Jade spends most
of the book in a detached fashion from the other moms: she makes it clear she
never felt like she truly belonged and resents having to go to Whitney when she
seems catatonic after learning of her friend’s death. When she finds herself staging
a get-together after Kiersten dies, she’s more upset about people seeing her
house and her family then the fact of her friends death.
Brooke is the
most troubled of the three women we meet in the novel, mainly because she seems
so closed off: she’s the only one who doesn’t cry after Kiersten is found dead
and has been acting increasingly bizarre for a while. We learn very quickly she
is the odd one out of the Mom’s Club. Her spouse Abby was the one who was
friends with the group and she’s been reluctantly included ever since. The two
of them met when they were both in rehab for alcohol abuse and they bonded and
eventually got married. This should have been a warning sign for both of them
that this relationship was not going to be a healthy one and indeed by the
start of the novel Abby and Brooke are in the process of divorcing – something
Brooke seems unwilling to accept.
When the moms
gather in the aftermath of Kiersten’s death, its quickly become clear that the
police – led by Detective Perez – are viewing this as suspicious. Whitney
insists that they tell them the truth. This changes when Perez makes clear that
the death is suspicious.
Part of what
makes this novel funny at times – and it can be darkly so – are the scenes
between Whitney and Detective Perez. Whitney spends most of the novel, like the
other two narrators, certain that she’s a good person as well as the fact that
she’s superior to everyone who isn’t part of her circle. When she’s called back
in Perez, she wants to make it clear she’s certain her friend didn’t kill
herself but was murdered and Perez tells her she thinks the same thing. Perez
is the hero of this novel so naturally we never see the story from her
perspective but whenever she’s around Whitney it’s clear that she judges not
only her but all of the women in this circle. Whitney keeps thinking that this
detective is unworthy of respect when she starts questioning Whitney about where
she was at the time of her friend’s death. Whitney thinks she can manipulate
Perez the way because she is rich. This is the first of many stupid things she
does during the novel.
Brooke has been
struggling her whole time in Beverly Hills
for acceptance. The Mom’s at the club were all Abby’s friends, not hers, and
its clear none of them ever had any respect for her. We never see the novel
from Abby’s perspective but its clear that she’s the dominant one in this
relationship – she couldn’t carry a child so Brooke agreed to even though she
never wanted a domestic life. Then Abby tells Brooke she wants a divorce and we
later learn she’s been having an affair with a younger woman before this
something she is unapologetic about. Brooke ends up relapsing not long after
and ends up assaulting someone at a party. Because the group has always preferred
Abby to Brooke they never care about her side of the story.
Brooke would be
the sympathetic character in this book – she very quickly becomes the focus of
the investigation because of the other mom’s
- but she is just as deluded and narcissistic as the others. She refuses
to accept the marriage is over, tries to use Kiersten’s memorial as a way to
get back together with Abby and when the memorial ends is so upset at Brooke’s
attitude that she shoves her. When Abby takes her son over to Whitney’s in
order to protect her child Brooke’s becomes truly unhinged, ranting on social
media in what amounts to a three-hour monologue and in a custody hearing
refuses to take the fact that there has to be a psychological hearing before
things can proceed as a justifiable reason for her to not see her baby.
Jade is the harshest
of the group, mainly because she doesn’t come from money and they live in a
house that is owned by her husband’s parents. In her mind, her husband is lazy
because he can’t hold a job for long – and its worth noting she seems unable to
process how jobs work – when he tells her that half the company was laid off, she
uses it to say that he wasn’t working hard enough. She’s upset because she has
to quit therapy because she doesn’t like her husband. What she really doesn’t
like is living in a mansion and not being able to invite guests over because it
has Ikea furniture instead of the latest from Rodeo Drive. The fact that Jade
cares about status then love really should be a big giveaway.
Throughout the
book whenever we feel the slightest bit of sympathy for any of the characters
Berry – sometimes through their own thoughts, sometimes through Perez –
immediately yanks it away. We learn that Whitney’s husband Colin has a gambling
addiction and she makes it clear that she doesn’t considering gambling a real
disease the way drug and alcohol addiction are. (It’s not clear she thinks
those are real problems either.) When Perez asks Whitney why she doesn’t just divorce
Colin she says she loves her husband but its clear that’s barely true. We learn that the talent agency she runs is a
front for an escort agency – one that often involves using minors. She doesn’t
have a license because that would mean having to pay taxes on her income and
the whole reason she’s doing that is to hide money from Colin. When Perez
discovers this – with barely any work – and reminds her its illegal, Whitney
jokes that “she was hoping we could avoid that small detail.” Something that
doesn’t amuse Perez at all.
It doesn’t take
much work for Perez to learn something that we learn late in the novel: Whitney’s
marriage has been a sham from the start but for her Colin has been the one who
caused the problems. When he says outright late in the novel that she loves
Kiersten more than him, she just states it as a fact. (That’s far from the most
shocking thing we learn about their marriage but that you should find out for
yourself.) We actually learn that Whitney and Kiersten have been swapping
husbands for awhile and that Whitney has been having members of her escort
agency service Colin in an effort to keep him happy – something she has no
intention of apologizing for. When she learns that Colin has been having an
affair with someone else among the mom’s, she takes this as the final straw,
even though it plays into the narrative that Whitney has been controlling this
marriage from the beginning.
There are more secrets
to be revealed, including who the murderer of Kiersten and why. What is shocking
is not just who did it and why but because none of the characters feel any
remorse about what happened and even the murderess still thinks she can save
her marriage and her family after all of this. When all the crimes are revealed
Whitney realizes that Perez is brilliant because ‘none of us have spent a
single second on her husbands in this scenario. But she had.” Indeed it speaks
to the narcissism of all involved that this could have been solved if they’d had
conversations with their spouses instead of this – and they were so focused on
themselves that it never occurred to them.
Yet even this
revelation doesn’t lead to falling action: there are far darker moments at the
end and a deeper and more unsettling twist when we learn one last unsettling
truth about the deceased. What it is I will not even hint at here but it argues
that at the end of the day Kiersten has been a very real sense controlling all
of the actions that started this and while she didn’t deserve to die, she is
guilty of a betrayal far worse than that and it remains unclear if that truth
will ever come out.
Keep Your Friends
Close is
a short read; 270 pages in paperback. According to her profile she’s a former
psychologist, ‘who uses her clinical experience to blur the line between fiction
and non-fiction. She enjoys taking her readers on a journey through the dark
recesses of the human psyche.” And boy does she in this one. But at least she
has a better perspective of the characters she writes about; in her
acknowledgements she thanks her readers: “I’m glad you like my books and enjoy
being traumatized. Thanks for going with me on this wild ride.” No, no, Dr. Berry,
thank you.
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