All is Vanity

Christina Schwarz

Margaret, an English teacher in a New York private school, makes the brash decision to leave her position and spend the next year writing a novel. In her infinite wisdom, she believes this will be an easy task despite never having published as much as a short story before. She has illusions of grandeur, that her best-selling novel will show the world how brilliant she truly is and turn her into the talk of the town. After spending several months having a great amount of difficulty "getting started" - she has no direction for her book and she procrastinates her time by doing a million other absolutely necessary things such as painting the room her computer is in a soothing color more condusive to writing - she realizes that she is in big trouble, especially since she's been lying to her husband and everyone else around her that the novel is going great and is halfway finished.

Meanwhile, in L.A., her best friend Letty, the two of them inseparable since grade school, is having troubles of her own. Her husband has recently secured a position with the famous Otis museum, and Letty, who has been raising a family of four on a modest budget in a modest home, is trying to transform herself into fitting her new "affluent" social position. She buys a house in the right part of town, near Beverly Hills, and then gets caught up with redesigning and redecorating the house in a way that keeps up with the Joneses, even though she finds the whole idea of that ridiculous on many levels. The two friends correspond via email and as Letty describes the daily hardships of purchasing the right club chairs and hiring the right gardener, Margaret finds inspiration in Letty's life. She begins writing a novel that mimics her best friend's new reality, urging Letty into financial burdens and social situations for which she is not suited or which she cannot afford just so that her novel has the necessary heightened tension and drama.

The book mostly alternates between Margaret's narrative and Letty's email letters, and Schwarz gives us an entertaining (and on some level, horrifying) glimpse into the pretensions of the upper middle class, the folly of ambition, and the precarious bonds of friendship. Darkly comic and often clever, this novel is written briskly and lively enough to be effective for the story it's telling. If you're looking for a deep meaningful book, look elsewhere. Or, if you're one who has to like the characters in order to enjoy a book, this might not be a good choice either. Because, certainly, it is difficult to like either of these women, but as a pair they serve up plenty of light entertainment.