Little Vanities - Sarah Gilmartin [Review]

Little Vanities is one of those books that I can see the appeal of more than I can actually feel it. It follows two couples in Dublin, Dylan and Rachel, Stevie and Ben, from the glow of their Trinity years into the much less flattering reality of adulthood, where ambitions have thinned out a bit, relationships have settled into routine, and everyone seems to be living a slightly smaller life than the one they once had in mind. When Ben, after endless auditions, lands a role in Pinter’s Betrayal, the parallel is not exactly subtle: old loyalties start shifting, dormant wants re-emerge, and the book becomes very interested in what happens when the roles people have assigned themselves stop fitting properly.

All of which is promising material, and very much the sort of thing I should enjoy. Friendship, ambition, growing up, disappointment, performance in every sense. But in practice I just found myself a bit removed from it the whole time.

My main issue was the four central characters, who I kept feeling I should be able to distinguish more clearly than I actually could. You can see the differences being drawn: one is the former rugby star, one is a failed actor, one is carrying the weight of a miscarriage, and so on. On paper, they are not interchangeable. But too often they felt distinguishable only by the broad features the book gives you to separate them: “the rugby player is married to the one that isn’t a physiotherapist”. I never really felt I knew them as separate people, never pictured them especially vividly, never got that sense of one character having a presence so specific that they start to live a little beyond the page.

That is a fairly big problem in a book so dependent on relationships and group dynamics. If a novel is asking you to care about the texture of a friendship group, the shifts in closeness, the resentments, the old desires that maybe never went away, then I need to feel who these people are beyond the fact that the author has assigned them different lives. Here, I often felt like I was reading four variations on a type rather than four fully realised people. They had differences, yes, but not enough distinction in feeling.

And because of that, a lot of the emotional weight just never landed as fully as it probably should have. When the affair is finally revealed, I realised I didn’t much care either way. I wasn’t angry on behalf of the betrayed partners, because the book hadn’t made me feel close enough to anyone to care. But I also didn’t buy into the sense that this was some longed-for, deeply felt connection finally being acted on.

I do think the book is trying to get at something real about growing up though, particularly that strange period where everyone’s life starts to take shape in ways that are not always fair or remotely in line with earlier expectations. There is something quite sad in that, and the book does capture that general atmosphere of drifting and quietly comparing your life to everybody else’s. I just wanted the characters themselves to be stronger vessels for all of that.

So overall, fine. Not bad, not one I actively disliked, but not one I felt particularly much for either. I can imagine other people finding it perceptive or moving in ways I didn’t. But for me it never quite became more than a book I understood in theory and admired at a distance.

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