Sally Koslow’s new novel, “With Friends Like These” (Ballantine Books), arrives in bookstores Aug. 10 with many ingredients that might lead some potential readers to dismiss it as yet another “chick lit” spin-off of “Sex & the City.”
The book tracks a quartet of professional women over the course of a decade in New York City, with the narrative juggling their professional and romantic adventures.
On the surface, Quincy, Talia, Chloe and Jules could be mistaken for clones of the four women in “SATC” and the characters in the countless books (and TV shows) that have lifted the format.
But Koslow digs much deeper than the standard pop novel aimed at a female readership. “With Friends Like These” is funny, but it’s also poignant and disturbing because the author offers no easy solutions to the serious problems faced by her four protagonists.
You don’t have to be a woman — or care much about shopping and other upscale consumer pursuits — to fall under the spell of this challenging examination of how time tests those tight friendships we form in our early 20s.
The story begins with a wonderful chapter set at the turn of the century in which the four women meet for the first time. Quincy is looking for roommates in her oversized Upper West Side apartment and Talia and Chloe and Jules are the ones she chooses. Actually, it’s the wildly outgoing Jules who makes the decision, by telling Quincy, when her intercom rings, “What do you say you tell whoever’s coming up that this place is rented?”
“I have a feeling about us,” Jules says to the other three women. “Something tells me we’re all going to be great friends.”
The author then jumps forward to the present with three of the women living
with their husbands in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Jules still single but living in Westport.
Koslow shows us how marriage, the arrival of children, and professional rivalries can undermine even the closest friendships.
What comes between the women are two of the elements some New Yorkers value above friendship — real estate and higher paying jobs.
In a really daring stylistic decision, Koslow chose to write “With Friends Like These” from four different “first person” points of view, so that we keep shifting our perspective — and alliances — as Quincy, Talia, Chloe and Jules command center stage in alternate chapters.
It takes a few chapters to get used to the device — and to get the four very different first-person “voices” straight — but once you delve deeply into this very wise and very troubling novel you should find yourself rushing to the end, wondering if the women will ever be able to restore their friendships.
