MixedThe Chicago Review of BooksThe best thing about Kamila Shamsie’s eighth novel, Best of Friends, is the story isn’t hinged on a friendship gnarled with sexual, bodily, or intellectual envy. The conflict is more nuanced, primarily marred by a class difference, but more implicitly by the contradictions that exist within a life-long friendship ... Shamsie uses this strife between class and desire as a catalyst in the development of her characters...This portion of the novel is excellent. Zahra and Maryam are juggling family drama, school, the changes in their adolescent bodies, aspirations, and male attention ... This is where the problem with the novel starts. The plot fast-forwards to 2019 when Zahra and Maryam are in their forties, living independent and ambitious lives in London. Every now and then, in the midst of an unrelated conversation, one of them mentions Jimmy. This seems forced, as if Shamsie is not confident in the connections she’s making in her story and that she must signal to the reader to remember what happened that night and to hold on to it until the chilling moments of confrontation that take place at the end. Shamsie could be granted leeway. Perhaps she wants to show that trauma works like a leaky faucet: it drips and deposits mold on the surface before it finally bursts ... But Shamsie’s portrayal of the episode with Jimmy isn’t convincing enough to make it believable that Maryam and Zara are still clutching on to it after three decades. Even though the scene is thrilling, the fear palpable, the stakes heightened—it’s never to the point where we comprehend it to be the ultimate wound ... The second half of the novel is also rushed. Shamsie doesn’t pause to leisurely explore connections or illustrate characters in deft strokes. Instead, she tries to tie in political issues to their motivations, leaving us with a distracting plot and a weak narrative arc. When the novel ends, you can’t help but wonder how Maryam and Zara sustained their friendship for as long as they did in spite of deep-seated resentment. Shamsie answers this in the very first pages...Yet this subtext flounders at the first instance of conflict and the subtleties Shamsie effortlessly creates in the first half of Best of Friends dissolve like Zahra and Maryam’s friendship.
