Little Vanities by Sarah Gilmartin: book review

Little Vanities by Sarah Gilmartin

Going into this book, I had extremely high expectations because Service is one of my favorite books of all time. It gripped me from page one and left me dazed on the other side. I can't quite say that Little Vanities did the same, though there's still plenty to admire in the novel. 

This is a book that makes its mark in the middle. While the usual pitfall is a saggy middle, Little Vanities has a hard time getting off the ground and making a smooth landing but is utterly page turning in its meat. It took me a while to get past the first 100 pages, but the first chapter we see the four central characters in their Trinity days, it all clicked together. Part of the problem is that Gilmartin sets up the book and its characters through their deflated present day selves. Rachel, a former bottle service girl who married a star rugby player, is struggling to get pregnant with her second child and care for her husband as he navigates the murk of long COVID. Dylan, her husband, is fixated on both the loss of his physical capacity and the identity death that has accompanied leaving rugby with so much of his life being oriented around what his body could do. Dylan's condition is further complicated because he endured both a sports injury that temporarily took him out of the game and prevented his career from blossoming as much as it might have and then the long COVID that permanently took him out of the game and has decimated his ability to partake in life as normal with his young family. These two things are kind of blended together in the opening, making it difficult to track what exactly Dylan is experiencing. Then there's Ben, Dylan's childhood best friend, who's finally gotten his big break as an actor landing a main role in a play at The Abbey and his partner Stevie who went to Trinity with them and is a physical therapist. There's an implication that maybe some messy things happened in their past that are still unresolved at middle age. It's obvious that no one is happy with how their life has turned out; they're all disaffected in some way. But there's really no weight, no pressing gravity to who these people are or the situation they're in until we go back and learn what happened in their university days. Then, when we return to the present timeline, we understand the unspoken tensions and the awkwardness of a set of friendships that have endured longer than they were meant to. 

The main drama of the book is a possible affair between Stevie and Dylan. It's hinted that even though Ben and Stevie have been together since college that something happened or nearly happened between Dylan and Stevie and the hypothetical of what could have been has remained an open question ever since. Everyone's dissatisfaction with their lives creates the necessary opening to consider what might have been. In these early sections, I found it hard to remember between Ben and Dylan who the actor and the rugby player were. I kept swapping them around. No one felt very defined for around a hundred pages. It felt like Gilmartin thought the preamble was necessary when maybe we could've just gotten to the backstory that would make everything click into place sooner. Because, really, what happens in the university years isn't the backstory but the true front story that the drama and tension pushes from. I like the idea of zooming out and seeing how these loose threads fester and manifest almost twenty years removed, but I didn't feel like their adult lives were the true heart. The writing, even, becomes much more vibrant in these past sections. 

I did find myself utterly gripped through the middle of the novel as we deftly slide back and forth between the will-they-won't-they of the present timeline affair matched with the major questions around just how far Dylan and Stevie went in college, their friendship, formed through Ben, having a palpable extra layer from the start. Gilmartin does a good job of pacing the hooks for untold stories from the past and then the reveals for maximum payoff. I didn't want to put the book down as I glided around Dublin watching these characters fall together and fall apart, bouncing through all four of their points of view. There is plenty here to be impressed by. 

I particularly loved how Dublin as a setting grew much richer as the book progressed. Living in Dublin, this was extra vibrant for me as I knew all the streets the characters walked down, exactly what these places look and feel like. The most pivotal scene in the novel takes place in Sandycove and watching Stevie take the DART out then walk down to the strip of beach and then the Forty Foot was such a cool experience personally as I've spent a lot of time tracing her exact footsteps. I took the book to Trinity to read the final pages. Just how Dublin the book is was definitely a huge selling point in endearing me to it. 

Ultimately, though, the great momentum that was built does die at the end as the dramatic cliff doesn't really lead anywhere. It's very realistic but somewhat unsatisfying. Then Gilmartin spends longer than necessary following each of the characters through a flash forward, showing what their new normal is like after the climax's revelations. These scenes are just too long and feel inconsequential to the greater point of the novel, almost like when you're watching a Real Housewives finale and the little boxes pop up to tie up all the loose ends that have been resolved since filming ended. I found my attention drifting and to some degree, the hollow feeling of these characters once more revealed by the absence of momentum that finally pushed them into life. Maybe my expectations were just far too high, but I just found this to be an incredibly interesting experiment playing with the affair novel and the question of roads not taken (a popular theme this year with other books like Permanence and The Ten Year Affair) that didn't fully make the landing.

Overall: 4

Spoilers: a note on the ending — I can't figure out how I feel about it. I think that it didn't work for me not because of how it ended but how that ending was belabored. Stevie and Dylan do finally get together, not in an illicit fashion but because their partners find out about the emotional + kissing affair and it temporarily blows up their life enough that they feel obligated to try to give it a go. It is awful in reality, and Stevie walks away from the experience concluding that sometimes the road not taken (as she had similar intimate close encounters with Dylan in college that never materialized into anything more, leaving the open thread for them to pick up in adulthood) happens not because of chance or interference or whatever but simply because the road was never meant to be taken. The relationship was never going to work in reality. The fantasy was, in fact, better. 

I think we've all had regrets in relationships, whether they be romantic or platonic, about how one choice could've massively changed the course of your life. And I like this book being like, hey, sure, you could've but it was going to be awful and wrong in every lifetime. That's why you didn't do it in the first place. But for such a stark, non-event ending, I think the book needed to leave it there—at Stevie realizing that this was simply never supposed to be. Watching, instead, how Dylan returns to his family life relatively unaltered and Stevie and Ben break-up felt like it diluted the impact for me. There was a certain clinical lack of emotionality to the untangling of a series of very dramatic events that left me wanting so much more. All that for this?, I wondered. And I'm not typically picky on endings. 

Overall, I am glad that I read the book, but I feel like it could've benefited from a bit sharper lens on exactly what the novel is trying to accomplish.