Very Slowly All at Once by Lauren Schott

 

This was another surprisingly funny novel, though it's really much more a novel of social commentary--almost but not quite satire, I think--than it is something like a crime novel or a thriller, both of which genres it does at least abut. All sorts of things in the text and subtext about striving and social climbing and social gatekeeping and money, and how just about everyone has someone they're looking up at, or down on, and how in a lot of places the social strata are fixed in place. The mains are deeply human, remarkably easy to empathize with, completely believable and plausible, and well written; some of the other characters feel a little sketchy, but nothing super horrible. There is something of an omnicompetent sociopath lurking or looming, and that's not something I'm normally willing to gladly let slide, but I'll gladly let it slide here, because the misdirection about the sociopath's identity feeds into much of the rest of what the novel's doing (and their eventual identity is especially congruent with the novel's other themes). A suitably mixed ending. Really a good novel.