18 SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020
AS UNKIND ASthe three main characters of
Araminta Hall’s “Imperfect Women” can
be to one another — envious, judgmental,
competitive and spiteful — their in-
ternecine meanness is nothing like the
brutality of their self-laceration. As one
hisses to herself: “You’re no better than
the ugly sisters trying to squeeze their feet
into the glass slipper, trying to take what
isn’t yours.” (To be fair to her harsh analy-sis, she is sleeping with her dead friend’s
husband at the time.)
Hall is a British novelist whose first
thriller, “Our Kind of Cruelty,” was a chill-
ing story about a man obsessed with his
ex-girlfriend. Here she turns her close at-
tention to women — how complicated their
lives are; the Faustian bargains they
make when they get married and raise
children, or not; the complicated nature of
their friendships; how hard they are on
each other and themselves.
The three main characters — Eleanor,
Nancy and Mary — have been best friends
since the day they met during their first
week at Oxford. Now they’re grown and
their lives have spun in varied directions,
as lives tend to do, throwing into relief the
differences in their financial, professional
and romantic fortunes.
Two are married and have children; one
isn’t and doesn’t. One has a great job; the
others don’t. All are filled with regrets of
broken dreams and paths not taken and
envy at what their friends apparently
have. Not one is entirely happy with her
choices, with her own particular approach
to the classic work-life balance conun-
drum. (Does anyone ever solve that prob-
lem?) All try to be good people and none
really succeed.
Death comes quickly in the story when
Nancy’s battered corpse is found by the
side of the road early one morning. It is a
horrible shock. Nancy was the enchanted
princess of the trio, with beauty, charm,
wit, an attractive husband, plenty of
money. Even in death, one of her friends
says, she “had more influence than most
people did when they lived.”
Who wouldn’t want to kill someone like
that?
Everyone is a suspect. There’s Nancy’s
secret lover, whom she was apparently
planning to leave on account of his exces-
sive clinginess and irritating self-regard.
(We won’t learn his identity until later.)
There’s her apparently clueless husband,
Robert, whose claim that he knew nothing
about Nancy’s extramarital activities isnot particularly convincing.
And there are, of course, her best
friends: jealous, never-married Eleanor
— who fancied Robert first, but who never
stood a chance with him while Nancy was
alive — and mousy Mary, a martyr to her
own cruel and overbearing husband and
her demanding children.
Each woman gets her own discrete sec-
tion in the book, which takes place in three
time frames: when the murder is discov-
ered (Eleanor); the period just before
(Nancy); and what happens later (Mary).
Coming after Eleanor’s account, Nancy’s
extended pre-death flashback is a revela-
tion.
Who was she, anyway? Probe beneath
the glittering surface of such a person and
see how easy it is for an outsider to get it
wrong, to forget that no one is as perfect or
happy or fulfilled as we imagine in our jeal-
ous fantasies.
We hear that Nancy feels hollow and
useless, flattened by malaise; that she en-
vies her friends for their “thicker and
fuller” lives; that her husband discounts
her distress; that a perfect storm of un-
happy emptiness has made her ripe for the
giddy euphoria of an affair that does little
but feed her ego.
Now she is rived with guilt, the initial
headiness of the relationship ceding to the
realization that her lover is, basically, a
controlling jerk. “Her head was filled with
terrible thoughts that made her want to
scream into a darkened corner,” Hall
writes. “The sharpness of her betrayal
wedged itself between her ribs like an ar-
row, its poison spreading through her
blood.”
The book creeps on you slowly, like a
fog, until you find yourself enveloped in
this tangled skein of relationships, eager
to see how all this is going to play out, whois going to betray whom and in what way.
Sometimes you feel annoyed at the women
for being so baroquely hard on them-
selves, just as Robert feels annoyed at
what he perceives to be Nancy’s whining
about her amorphous unhappiness. “You
can be many things in this life, but a dissat-
isfied woman is not one of them,” Nancy
thinks.
The final section of the book is reserved
for Mary, the faded friend. Her surrender
to wifehood and motherhood has turned
her into what appears at first to be the
least interesting person in the original trio
of friends, particularly now that her
ghastly husband has fallen prey to some
sort of irritating illness that requires her
constant attention. But she’s not boring at
all. Everyone has underestimated the
depths of her feelings and the lengths she
is willing to go.
“Imperfect Women” is not a conven-
tional detective story, but an investigation
into character and motivation. The real
mysteries concern love, friendship, obli-
gation, the disappointments that come
with the passage of time and the mysteries
of other people’s hearts — as well as your
own.
“It will always be difficult for a man to
understand what women mean to each
other,” Nancy says at one point. “None of
them,” she observes, thinking about her-
self and her friends, “had really become
what they imagined for themselves when
they used to sit up into early mornings dis-
cussing what they would do with their
lives.”
Nancy’s death, as shocking and unfortu-
nate as it is, turns out to be a precursor to
the real story here, a long tease for the
twist Hall saves for the end of this surpris-
ing book. After all that has happened, it
feels like poetic justice. 0My Brilliant Friends
They’ve been pals for decades — until one of them winds up dead.
By SARAH LYALLSARAH LYALLis a writer at large for The Times.IMPERFECT WOMEN
By Araminta Hall
294 pp. MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.THE HEADS OF STATETimes Style.
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