Other People’s Fun by Harriet Lane evaluate – darkly comedian story of envy and revenge within the Insta age | Fiction

Of all of the seven lethal sins, envy is the final to be commodified. You can perceive why – not like lust, anger and even sloth, it’s not one thing to confess to. In his Allegory with Venus and Cupid, Bronzino depicted envy as an unsightly inexperienced hag, clutching her head and howling impotently; now Instagram has allowed anybody on-line to achieve entry to pictures of the life of these richer, prettier and luckier than ourselves.

Ruth, the narrator of Harriet Lane’s third novel, Other People’s Fun, is corroded by it. Alone, her marriage over, her daughter grown and her freelance work as boring as it’s low paid, she is that the majority harmful of characters: an missed middle-aged lady with nothing to lose. When she bumps into lovely, silly and entitled Sookie at a college reunion, she reconnects together with her teenage self “and all her violent desires”. Having flown underneath the radar as a pupil, observed by Sookie solely as a result of she lent her her essays, she has excellent recall of her personal petty humiliations, now amplified by the truth that she will be able to stalk her contemporaries’ “best lives” on social media, whereas virtually none of them keep in mind her.

“Are they spilling over with guile, or entirely lacking it? I am never sure. There they are, ceaselessly insisting on the fact of their existence, imagining someone might give a fuck about their dog, their children’s exam results, the Spanish Steps, a colander of blackberries on a wooden kitchen table … I lurk. I am the audience, transfixed, eyes shining in the darkness. After all, if someone wants to be seen, someone else must watch,” Ruth tells us.

Lane’s two earlier novels, Alys, Always and Her, had been elegant psychological thrillers revolving round poisonous fascination between two ladies, one wealthier and seemingly extra refined than her clever however downtrodden foil. It’s the sort of fiction that Patricia Highsmith excelled at, or Zoë Heller in Notes on a Scandal, and a subgenre to which Lane has added layers of rage at being poor, powerless and virtually invisible to the extra lucky.

In Other People’s Fun, the prevailing temper is certainly one of black comedy fairly than menace. Ruth and Sookie are former contemporaries at a minor public college whose liberal ethos and complacent narcissism are paying homage to Bedales (the place Lane was a pupil). Decades later, the beautiful individuals who as soon as had consuming issues and kleptomania now personal enterprise empires which embody “mindfulness festivals, forest bathing, organic skincare and a wellbeing podcast”. The solely luxuries Ruth has are those who she shoplifts or steals from Sookie. Desperate to be seen, she’s like an Anita Brookner heroine on steroids. The conflict between her resentful, sardonic intelligence and Sookie’s on-line self-satisfaction is deliciously uncomfortable, particularly as soon as Ruth realises that what her “friend” actually needs is assist to have an affair with their charismatic former trainer, Waxham, whom they each had a crush on as youngsters.

Of course, Ruth gives Sookie her modest dwelling in an retro a part of north London as a trysting place, and naturally it is going to all go very flawed. The fascination of Other People’s Fun is much less its plot than its queasy portrait of stalking and manipulation. Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed that Iago in Othello had “motiveless malignancy” in his want to destroy the noble Moor; Ruth’s envious hatred is, as she says, “all I’ve got in the tank right now”. Not that there’s something morally superior about her goal. The distinction between the luxuries that Sookie takes with no consideration and our narrator’s battle to survive as a low-paid translator of German advertising and marketing copy goes all the way in which again to boarding college, the place “we were endlessly tumbled together like stones at the bottom of the sea. It knocked the corners off some of us, but some of us developed flint-sharp edges.”

The finest comedy is sharpened by ache, and what Lane has pinpointed in her flint-sharp novel is one thing that has a extremely trendy resonance because the world of the haves and have-nots turns into more and more polarised and poisonous. When Ruth will get her revenge, it’s as nasty as it’s whole. You will, I worry, howl with satisfaction.