As the novel opens,Trevor is caught up in a development scandal,and Therese starts to question the ethics of her life’s transactions. Having married into immense privilege,Therese has recently been plagued by “a cracking feeling”. Meanwhile,her downstairs neighbour Claire enters a phase of shedding:her possessions,her makeup,disavowing her beauty routine,and renegotiating her life with her husband to do less “emotional labour”. To Therese,Claire’s journey to a place beyond grooming and towards radical honesty becomes unexpectedly seductive.
Despite having actively embraced commercial bottom-lines in her business,which sells “the fantasy of time to read poetry and handwritten letters to women who scrambled to make it through the day without braining themselves on a desktop paper spike”,Therese is beginning to realise that there is something unseemly and intractable about her circumstances. The aesthetics of her brand,for example,which once oozed what she thought of as wellbeing,she now sees as “wealth”.
Perkins has a lot of fun with Therese’s slow-motion implosion. She is particularly expert at skewering the absurdities of privilege. At one point,Therese laments the lack of a phone signal “as if not having signal was a lifestyle choice and in a crisis we should be able to switch it the f--- on”. The character Claire also comes out with some ripping one-liners,such as “the word woman is a category error”.
Part of Therese’s reckoning is to do with the self-effacement that seems to characterise the life of middle-class women. At one point Therese laments “who are you if you’re not looking after someone?” On a holiday with her extended family,she is responsible for organising presents,cooking,caring for Trevor’s grandchildren,and “the million invisible things that would make the day good”. Yet Therese assumes these responsibilities without having been asked.
Meanwhile,Trevor’s children,each beneficiaries of a substantial trust fund,are mostly concerned with how the fraud investigation into their father could impact their standing.