How long I want to be your friend: a "The Other's Gold" review

People always say high school contains the most formative years of a person's life, but I think college can fight for that title. There's something about delving into a specific major and becoming an adult that feels so much bigger than being a teenager, broadly educated but popping into interests that may become careers. There's still drama and mistakes, but being on the precipice of having a degree and launching into the big bad world feel more monumental to me than what I experienced in high school.

Perhaps that's the reason why Elizabeth Ames's The Other's Gold resonated with me when I first read the blurb. It also didn't hurt that it had Celeste Ng's seal of approval. A near-literary debut spanning from freshman year of college to motherhood, the book promised an incisive look at the psyches of four young woman as they reeled from irreparable life events. After a few failed attempts to read it, I was able to check out an e-book thanks to my local library's Libby branch (we stan Libby on this blog). Eager to get going, I started reading The Other's Gold, hoping to be wowed.

While I was wowed at parts, this book left me with mixed emotions. It's a complicated novel, graphic at parts, and lacking the character depth I was expecting. Although each protagonist fulfills and goes beyond archetypes, their personalities feel interchangeable throughout the years that transpire, their backstories intense but characterization less so. The incidents themselves are all shocking, but the handling of some leave a sour taste in my mouth. However, Ames's prose is mostly great, and the framing and plot progression of the novel are effective, omniscient narration allowing the reader equal time in each character's head. Despite feeling like an overstuffed debut, Ames's The Other's Gold is captivating and intriguing from start to finish, taking a look at these girls' ugliest moments and never glamorizing them. Humanity can be savage, and sometimes the only way to fend off the animal instincts is keeping your friends close.

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In the fall of 2002, Quincy-Hawthorn College gains four new students: Alice, a sporty blonde rower; Ji Sun, the daughter of a rich Korean family that endorses the school; Lainey, biracial and bisexual adoptee, passionate Democrat, feminist, and eager to be in a relationship; and Margaret, the curly-haired and wide-eyed optimist. The young women share a suite with a window seat, and after the first night, screaming along to Bikini Kill, they become bound for life. Their freshman year is met with begrudging acceptance of boyfriends, probing questions that initially go nowhere, and the kind of raw sisterhood that leaves the girls at odds but ultimately content. However, their bond will be tested throughout the years, following them outside of college and into motherhood. The first, a childhood accident that left one girl with a scar on her face and her brother intellectually damaged. The second, a professor's sexual harassment rumors cresting the surface, one girl's statement misinterpreted as a claim. The third, a kiss with a minor. The fourth, a bite on the cheek of the mother's own daughter. Each event shapes how each woman sees the others, but is that enough to drive them apart? Or will the universality of an inner animal keep them united, no matter how much it makes them want to turn away?

If there's one thing The Other's Gold has going for it, the novel is impossible to put down. Ames's writing and the events of the novel are gripping, and after each chapter, I wanted to read another. It takes a certain amount of power to achieve that in a narrative, and even with the unlikable actions that run abundant here, the story was never dull. Utilizing an omniscient third person point of view, the reader slips in and out of each woman's head effortlessly. Their voices can blend together at points, and some of Ames's prose does get clunky in attempts to be verbose, but it generally works well, especially because we follow the protagonists for more than a decade of their lives. To see what shifted and stayed the same throughout the years was interesting and worth the ride.

However, the events themselves were not as consistent. While they all were equally horrifying and hard to swallow, some suffered from withholding information. The response that everyone has to an incident is not to talk about it, and when someone works to break the rule, they're pushed back into the shadows again. While the first event happened when the character was a child, dealing with her brother's body-shaming and understandably having enough, lying about getting sexually assaulted to join in solidarity with your fellow Korean-Americans is another can of worms. Although the character involved feels guilt for it years afterward after it affects a classmate she forgets, and the incident itself poses a what-if on someone lying pre-#MeToo in order to help people, The Accusation still doesn't sit completely right with me (and perhaps that's the point). I also feel that The Bite strayed away from the trauma the mother was facing following the incident in favor of an infidelity plot that nobody faced repercussions for. The Kiss never got resolved with the girls relinquishing their blaming of the person who initiated it, even though the kiss was influenced by terrifying past abuse that left the woman wanting to pretend she was a kid again. It doesn't completely forgive the act of kissing a minor, but it's at least believable, and it's a shame that the women never talked about it as a group. Their bond was resilient despite it all, and given how often stuff was brushed under the rug, you'd think it wouldn't be. But that isn't the case.

This might be because there's a universality with the incidents and the women. Each one deals with the girls succumbing to their base instincts, primal for different reasons. Whether to defend themselves, be a shield, go back to a simpler time, or express insatiable love, Alice, Ji-Won, Margaret, and Lainey confront the animal within all of them, the complexity outweighed by the simple desire to fight for what they think is just. Naturally, this does cause them to seem interchangeable despite a few defining characteristics, those archetypes imploding and reforming time and time again. However, this shared carnal root makes them more human; sometimes, we want to give into our inner desires just to stay alive. Although Ames could have handled the fallout from those explosive moments better, I do have to admire the acknowledgement of what's lying dormant beneath all of us.

Even with its faults, Elizabeth Ames's debut project is still a good read, perfect for book club discussions and a contemplative sunny day. To me, The Other's Gold would benefit from getting optioned for TV, as hour-long episodes, maybe spanning multiple seasons, could expand the content here and grant it more emotional immediacy. As it stands, though, the novel is a recommended slice of contemporary if you're looking to acknowledge the ugliest parts of yourself amidst the aughts: Iraq War protests, economic recession, and stubborn friendship.