Small-sized reviews, raves, and recommendations.

Spanning decades and crossing the continent, Clutch, by Emily Nemens is a sprawling group portrait of five professional women and their everyday challenges and triumphs. The narrative begins with an extended introduction of each woman as they arrive for a reunion at a hotel in Palm Springs, California. Laughter, tears, and micro-dosing ensues. After the reunion, the narrative alternates between the present and the past, the backstories adding depth and context to each woman’s story. Like a nineteenth century Russian novel, Nemens provides a list of dramatis personae. The five women and their immediate and extended families makes for a large amount of personalities to keep track of. It is a steep learning curve, at least in the opening chapters, but each of the five main characters is distinct and memorable.

The five main characters are Gregg, a tough-as-nails progressive legislator from Texas. Her aspirations to higher political office are complicated by a tech-bro husband and an unplanned pregnancy. She has two children and doesn’t want any more. Her desire to terminate her pregnancy is contrasted by Reba, a former management consultant, deep into IVF treatments and hoping against all odds for a pregnancy that doesn’t end in miscarriage. There is Bella, a Manhattan-area corporate litigator, working at a white shoe law firm straight out of a Louis Auchincloss novel. She is defending a 4Loko-type caffeinated cocktail maker in a high-stakes lawsuit. In an open relationship with her husband, work, life, and ambition are hurtling her towards a mental breakdown, except she is too enmeshed in her professional life to read the signs. Hillary, an EMT physician in Chicago, supports Zeke, her husband with substance abuse problems. Carson, a New York City-based writer and academic coach, struggles to achieve personal and professional fulfillment. She begins an ambiguous relationship with a former student but also works in a clandestine fashion to discover the truth about her father, a criminal in prison for acts both mysterious and heinous. Her mother tried to shield her from the awful facts, but Carson works to peel back the fog of lies and misdirection.

The five women reunite after a spouse dies in an untimely fashion. We also witness Gregg and Zeke’s battle of the sexes. In Gregg’s case, the personal is the political, when she goes to New York City to have her pregnancy terminated. On the political stage, she gets compared to JFK, but her actions – blunt-nosed rabble-rousing – make her more like Khrushchev. (She represents a bracing relief from the real-life Democrats and their endless roster of milquetoast, gutless technocrats more intent on feeling our pain than actually solving it. The Republicans, both real and imagined in this novel, come across as sanctimonious thugs, albeit in Clutch they aren’t a mob of bible-thumping Gary Glitters.)

In terms of representation, it was also nice to see Bella’s open relationship with her husband in a realistic light. Complicated and messy, the erotics were neither prurient or moralizing. No peanut gallery Jerry Falwells condemning the act. At the same time, her husband’s shenanigans with their nanny didn’t come across as Vaseline over the lens “lite porn.” While the shadow of Fifty Shades still looms across the literary landscape like an airborne toxic event, Clutch blows away at least a little bit of that irredeemable trash. It’s nice when adults can read about adults doing adult things. Be glad for such narratives, even if we have to endure another four years of this conservative Christian idiocracy.

Clutch, with its sprawling narrative and real-life characters, is a rewarding read. A multilayered story one can really delve into and get lost in. There’s a lot of characters to keep track of, but the novel rewards the attentive. Emily Nemens has created a gigantic mural depicting the tortured and contradictory lives of five women caught up in the everyday madness of modern American life. It has all the makings of a contemporary classic.