Review: Rich & Pretty by Rumaan Alam
Featuring a study on the "Insta-snapshot" description technique
A satirical literary novel on Manhattan socialites showing what’s behind their photos.
This book gets a LOT of mixed reviews, and I’m not surprised, because I think a lot of people didn’t know what to expect from it. This book helped me to better understand what contemporary literary fiction is:
It’s not a story. It’s an art exhibition.
That’s the only way to understand this book. If you go into it waiting for some huge climax to happen, or anticipating a momentous reveal at the end, you will be disappointed. This novel is not about plot; it’s all about characters. Specifically, it examines the relationship of the platonic best friends Sarah and Lauren entirely from their perspectives. However, what a lot of people failed to miss in their reviews of this book is just how satirical it really is. I thought the extreme snark made it obvious because it literally seeped off the pages.
This work is the opposite of “why the friendship of women endures everything” or “that book that made me remember why I love my bestie.” (Clearly a lot of the reviewers thought that’s what it was supposed to be when they left their angry reviews 😏). This book is the unfiltered, petty, biting remarks that these women honestly think of each other but will never admit aloud.
What makes it most interesting for me is that the author Rumaan Alam — a gay man of Bengali descent who lived in New York — is aware of the privileges of these women in a way that the characters themselves are not, and can never really be. Perhaps that’s why he can highlight the full spectrum of their shadow sides so well.
Once I understood what this book was, then I could see it as it had been laid out, a series of snapshots of what’s in their heads, and around them, and what they’re hiding from. (These "Insta-snapshot" descriptions were beautifully done — more on that technique later on in this post.) Since both women are constantly obsessed with how they are being perceived, you can feel how they live partly outside of themselves.
Everyone wants to be them, “Rich & Pretty” (the nicknames they were given, for one is rich while the other one is pretty) … except them. Neither of the girls seems to enjoy their lives and keeps thinking it would be better from the other’s perspective.
Together, they are supposed to have it all. But they both feel so empty, trying to fill their lives with so much stuff to make it seem like it all has a point. When the author peels back the masks of both, you see the extreme contrast between their appearances and their actual petty thoughts.
The climax is their fight:
"Are we friends anymore? Or is this friendship just a force of habit?"
Spoiler alert: It was just a habit, but neither wants to admit it, and they just stay friends. I was like, "But WHY?" and yet, I realized I know people like this, people who use a person to fill the gap another person left behind. Here, Sarah’s only brother had died when she was young, and it seems her way of coping with that was to latch onto this girl Lauren that her parents approved of and "made her" the sister she never had. It was this unspoken understanding that they would never break their connection, and because the brother-less Sarah is wealthy but her friend Lauren is not, Lauren benefits from letting her "adopted sister" pay for all sorts of things, etc. So they used each other, basically. Interestingly, they both use each other to escape various things, which reminds me of their home New York in so many ways. Let me explain:
How this book nailed the New York vibe perfectly:
All throughout this book, I was reminded of the song “New York” by the band U2, particularly the lines:
“In New York you can forget,
forget how to sit still…”
In New York I lost it all
To you and your vices
Still I'm staying on to figure out
Midlife crisis
Neither of these women, both in their early 30s, wants to slow down, stop, and really reflect on their life because it would be too disappointing, so they don’t. They’re both always running to the next function, event, fling, distraction, running, running, running to drown out everything they don’t want to face.
I made a list of things they avoid discussing that never get resolved just to prove this point:
🏃♀️All they run from:
Sarah never says more than a sentence of two about her dead brother, even to Lauren, who the whole family treats as “her sister.”
Lauren knows Sarah isn’t really in love with her fiancé Dan (He’s treated like an accessory.)
Lauren shows no signs of being excited to be the maid of honor in Sarah’s wedding, no initiative to plan anything. Lauren is always late to dinners to talk about it. She refuses to admit, even to herself, how much she clearly resents doing it but feels obligated to, always “told” what to do it by her bossy and plan-obsessed bestie Sarah.
Sarah says, “Dan would never cheat. He doesn’t have time.” Yet that line feels very much like she doesn’t really care what he’s doing with his time. She talks about him like clothing (“You want to be seen with him at parties.”) Yet she ignores reasons why he DOESN’T show up at parties with her.
Lauren doesn’t like to be touched by Sarah’s father, as if he has harmed her before, but no one talks about it.
Sarah had a miscarriage, but shows no feelings about it and won’t discuss it.
Lauren had an abortion, but they won’t talk about it.
Their lack of showing emotion around these things on the pages makes it feel like they’re deeply emotionally repressed or escapist types. On the other hand, I think the omission of bigger emotions is intentionally done. If readers could see more of their deeper emotional pain though, then it wouldn’t be the satire that it is.
Now for the writing craft discussion, I loved this thing I’m now calling:
📸The "Insta-snapshot" description technique
Every scene opened with or contained one of these moments: typically 1-2 paragraphs long. I could see these moments so clearly, just like the Instagram photos I imagine these “Insta-girls” taking. This layered description does so much to show:
Internal thoughts & voice🫨
History remembered🗝️
Hope for what’s next🔮
Evocative sensory detail👃
PLUS the tension between the two friends for being envious of what each other has that they do not🤺
Follow the emoji symbols to see where these bits occur:
I especially love the tension between them. Note that at the opening of this scene, they’ve just been smoking and want to freshen up for the party. Sarah (Ms. Rich) is asking Lauren (Ms. Pretty) why she never returns her calls. Lauren (ever-resentful) never gives a reason, her classic passive-aggressive comeback. At the scene’s end, the tension appears again as Sarah is fighting back to be “more pretty” than her friend, using the subtle diction of “adding inches” to tower over Lauren with “unassailable” taste. This kind of catty subtext lingers throughout the book.
See how SO much appears on just one page: their history together, the atmosphere, Lauren’s mood here as we’re in Lauren’s POV to show what Lauren is really hoping to get out of this party, and the feeling that they are like sisters, even in the way they try to outdo each other subtly. It’s an Instagram photo on a page, complete with commentary and filters. I see that bathroom, feel the undertones, and I’m there. Well done.
Thanks for reading 😁
Stay tuned next month, for during the first week of June, I’ll need you to vote on my next random library read!