Kate Christensen’s disarmingly frank and utterly engaging 11th novel, “Good Company,” skewers misogyny and ageism in and out of the book industry. Julia Heimdahl is a 50-something midcareer novelist stuck at a personal and professional crossroads. With a painful first marriage and a lifetime of dysfunctional family traumas in her past, Julia’s attempting to look forward.
Julia has built a life in Providence with her boyfriend Bryan, a Juilliard-trained musician 20 years her junior. The impetus for this intimate portrait of personal and literary reckoning is Julia’s attendance at a book festival held at her college alma mater. It’s a plum opportunity to invigorate her stagnant career, for Julia has learned that her “urbane, psychological, comic, and ‘small’ books have fallen out of fashion.” Determined to get back on track, Julia has done what any self-respecting novelist does when faced with a crisis such as this: She writes a memoir.
Christensen, who has been writing books for nearly three decades and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for her 2008 novel “The Great Man,” is, like her main character, simultaneously highly respected and underappreciated. (She has also published two memoirs.) For Julia, the frustrating contrast can be summed up as such: “Countless essays and reviews and stories published all over the damn place. A major literary award. But what does it all add up to? Maybe just survival.”
Facing this cliff of diminishing returns, many writers see memoirs as a means to refresh their relationship with longtime readers. In this case, rather than write another memoir herself, Christensen imagines one, threading excerpts from Julia’s memoir between chapters that narrate her weekend at the literary festival. “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” the title taken from a Neil Young song, is Julia’s litany of a lifetime’s bruised encounters. She has plenty to mine.
And yet even with that rich material, Julia finds the genre limiting, “more difficult than writing my novels, and also far less free in terms of telling the truth.” The memoir passages read like a diary: a display of disappointments lacking strong narrative reflection. The constrictive challenge of memoir writing doesn’t affect Julia’s fellow panelist, Ellis Blackwell, a thinly veiled version of biographer Blake Bailey, a literary star whose career stalled when he was accused of grooming minors and sexual assault. Julia enjoys his camaraderie and saucy banter over drinks at the hotel bar, eager to find common ground with a fellow frustrated author. With her wounded history on display, Julia is an easy mark for Ellis, who immediately latches onto Julia as an ally.
Emboldened and unsettled by her louche new pal, Julia promotes her new memoir in the festival’s sometimes explosive panel conversations. She’s having a great time, she thinks. At worst, she expects the ghosts of her coed past and a brutal hangover or two. We, too, swoon ever so slightly over a college crush, revel in the galvanizing energy of running into a talented former student, and cringe when Julia encounters a hateful frenemy turned best-selling author. The novel’s momentum builds as gossip that started at the hotel bar with Ellis slides from spicy chatter to sinister incrimination as the weekend unwinds.
Curiously, Julia encounters a character with a bracing resemblance to Christensen’s own peer and fellow Iowa Writer’s Workshop alum Ann Patchett. Lisa Scott has also written a memoir in addition to her Pulitzer-winning fiction. When Julia and Lisa dish about the day, Julia defends her new friend Ellis after Lisa asks if he’s rolled out his “whole Southern eccentric shtick on the panel.” Julia’s defensive posture provokes a “complex look” from Lisa mixed with “a hint of scorn. But of course, she’s far too professionally diplomatic to say what she’s thinking aloud.” Fortunately for the reader, Julia lacks Lisa’s diplomacy. Moving forward, she sheds her passive manner of showing the reader “what happened and let [them] figure it out.”
Overall, in this novel that performs the work of a memoir while also offering its critique, Christensen concentrates her gimlet eye on bad men, the women who enable them, and an industry all too eager to gobble up and discard young women. She zeroes in on the industry’s ongoing bent toward career optimization, which is in many ways tethered to the insidious ways women are conditioned to please men while diminishing their own self-worth. The distance of fiction offers Christensen a richer perspective that’s a degree removed from her personal experiences.
Earlier in the book, Julia lacks agency, admitting that she wrote the memoir because she “had no other outlet for all this.” Christensen’s novel turns from criticism of misogyny and ageism to a defense of fiction. Perhaps, she suggests, life’s thorny questions are better parsed through the complex art of fiction. Christensen reveals the ways that sometimes the stories we tell about ourselves — in fiction or memoir — are only as convincing and sincere as our ability to move past them.
GOOD COMPANY
By Kate Christensen
Harper, 256 pages, $28.99
Lauren LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.