Downtown Los Angeles, 1990. Alone in her luxury hotel suite, the reclusive Lacey Crane receives a message: Edith is waiting for her in the lobby. Former best friends, Lacey and Edith haven't spoken to one another in over four decades. As young adults meeting at summer camp in Maine, and later making their way in the glitzy spotlight of postwar Hollywood, Edith and Lacey share a deep-rooted bond that once saved them from isolation and despair, providing comfort from the public and private traumas that they had each endured and which a newly optimistic world was eager to forget. Told through a continuous, twisting conversation that unfolds over the course of a single evening, in which each woman tells her story and reveals long-hidden secrets, the narratives of Edith and Lacey burn with atmosphere, mystery, resentment, and regret.
The flawed narrative is in this case a relationship, and Hummel’s larger question is how — or whether — it can survive the expectations faced by women, both then and now ... A novel about agency and friendship whose questions reverberate far beyond its two protagonists and their particular time and place. Haunting and tragic, it nevertheless lands on a hopeful note.
Edith and Lacey’s history emerges in flashbacks ... Unfortunately, Edith and Lacey gain little complexity as the story progresses. As if to make up for her characters’ flatness, Hummel amply describes some scenic details ... But the hotel room is less vivid, and that’s where we stay, with two semi-stock characters who soliloquize at each other ... If only Hummel had followed the producers’ advice and added more layers to this script.
In this taut, tense, and layered novel, Hummel deftly examines the lives of two flawed women against the backdrop of the upheavals of the twentieth century.
