How Could She tackles societal pressures, biological clocks, jealousy, infidelity and more in an insightful yet comfortable manner ... Mechling has a gift for creating elaborate, realistic pretense and then marching straight through it with a machete, slicing it to bits in a way that is both shocking and frankly fun. How Could She is not so much plot-driven as it is a study of dynamics ... Mechling excels at creating realistically complex hopes, needs and disappointments ... How Could She is the perfect summer read. It’s entertaining, insightful and at times agonizingly true to life.
... tenderly caustic ... This is a book about white literary Brooklyn, and Americans who start every conversation with What do you do? and have trouble finishing one without letting you know where they went to college ... The quantity of backstabbing gossip at parties and happy hours in this book would qualify it as a comedy of manners, but it’s lite on laughs. Mechling doesn’t slide into parody or satire, but she doesn’t shy away from the details that allow it ... a more honest approach to how boring party conversation really is, how surface and unintellectual our thoughts. Petty insights are the backbone of this book ... The novel does not render an emotional world that brings us to our knees. It’s more like she’s making a case for rejiggering chick lit as the cruelest genre ... I found this book completely satisfying as an office novel.
There are few surprises in Lauren Mechling’s How Could She...but that doesn’t detract from the novel’s wit and spritzy entertainment ... In the lineage of Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and, well before that, Edith Wharton’s novels of New York status-striving, How Could She is enjoyably rich in taxonomic details about fashion, real estate and men. Ms. Mechling is fluent in the milieu of East Coast corporate media without being unduly impressed by it, and a light-fingered sense of satire accompanies her set-piece business lunches and dinner parties where jealous psychodramas ... The ever-shifting media landscape is a fitting backdrop for Ms. Mechling’s trenchant look at the subjective nature of status envy.
... astutely rendered ... Mechling does a remarkable job portraying the shifting realignments of the women’s loyalties, to each other and to their significant others. These are characters who will likely seem eerily familiar to certain readers. This specificity or, less charitably, this lack of diversity, is the novel’s one shortcoming. Mechling chronicles an almost exclusively white, upper middle-class slice of the city, though that relatively narrow focus helps make these portrayals ring so true[.]
Mechling’s whip-smart portrait of female friendship is perfect for fans of Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings (2013) and Beverly Gologorsky’s Every Body Has a Story (2018). Mechling excavates the layers of envy, support, and respect that fill the cracks in any long-term relationship. With an insider’s view of today’s media landscape, How Could She is a delight.
The plot is minimal, in terms of what actually 'happens 'because what actually matters is what’s happening in the characters' heads. Their relationships to each other are delicate and often painful but also essential to their understanding of their own adult lives ... Mechling details these dynamics with accountantlike precision so that the action is in the small slights and hurts and oversights that have accumulated over the years between them. While the novel flits lightly on the surface, even occasionally bordering on satire (Mechling, herself a journalist, is well-acquainted with the absurdities of the media industry), there is a profound and wistful melancholy at its core ... Not especially groundbreaking but emotionally astute; a pleasure.
Mechling is particularly insightful when it comes to the envy and affection that marks friendship, and clearly delights in writing Geraldine as the New York ingénue. Though the characters’ shallowness and relatively minor problems may turn off some readers, this is nevertheless a breezy, entertaining romp.
