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In his wifes closet, Edie gathers the silk and wool and cashmere in my hands.
Then she hears a voice.
When she turns around, a white woman is standing there wearing yellow rubber gloves and a Yale T-shirt.
I just wasnt finished looking at you.
It is often in the home where the plainest expressions of politics appear.
This year, you could see it everywhere in the domestic novel.
These stories came in a year that thrust white liberal parents into a harsh light.
Friends and Strangerscasts the least judgmental eye on this dynamic.
UnlikeLusterandSuch a Fun Age, the books houseworker protagonist is white.
So she hires Sam, who made her feel above all that.
Sam is a chubby 21-year-old on financial aid at the towns small, brand-name womens college.
Elisabeth, a writer struggling with her current book, is deeply lonely.
Elisabeths loneliness and Sams envy of Elisabeths life push them into a situation Elisabeth reads as friendship.
When Elisabeth meets Sams British boyfriend, she becomes vengefully jealous.
Sam discovers Elisabeths meddling in both her relationship and career and the friendship falls apart.
For that, she was grateful.
The book suggests that the facade of friendship in such a lopsided dynamic will inevitably fall away.
Lusteris not ambivalent about the power of the white mother.
Edie has lost her publishing job, so the offer is difficult to turn down.
Soon, Edie realizes Eric and Rebecca have a Black 12-year-old daughter named Akila.
Rebeccas interest in Edie begins to make sense on both practical and emotional levels.
Keep your enemy close and maybe she can help raise your Black daughter.
Rebeccas sociopathy becomes more acute as the novel presses on.
She performs autopsies for a living, and she likes breaking things apart and rebuilding them in her image.
Soon Rebecca is doing things like shooting a neighbors dog for barking too much.
She smiles and lies to the cops when they come to investigate.
An essential part of the transaction, of course, is Edies sexual relationship with Eric.
Rebecca welcomes Edie into their home, in large part, as a power play with her husband.
Soon, someone begins placing money sometimes large bills, sometimes a random assortment of coins on Edies dresser.
But it is also demeaning to be broke.
Such a Fun Agetakes up a modified version of this formula in the story of Emira and Alix.
She laughs politely at Alixs jokes.
But the nature of the display also hints at an attachment to her familys traditions.
Soon, Emiras story begins to echo Claudettes.
An unresolved attachment to this tradition compels these white mothers to inflict harm on the women they hire.
The books also hint at power dynamics beyond gender, race, age, and wealth.
All three protagonists possess higher education, a fact that never goes forgotten.
At the end of the latter book, Emira wonders what will come of Alixs daughter.
