Good Company

After celebrating a decade together and five years of marriage with my husband this past year, I’ve grown more and more interested in stories of marriage, what makes a good one, the struggles couples face and what can ultimately bring them down. Where I used to be drawn more to coming-of-age narratives now I find myself looking for a reflection of my own life in stories of motherhood and building a life with someone, come hell or high water.

Good Company by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney (author of the wildly successful The Nest) was exactly my cup of tea, delivered lukewarm. It centres around Flora Mancini and her best friend Margot and the men they marry, build lives with and eventually come to know more differently than they could have anticipated. For Flora, it begins with the discovery of her husband Julian’s “lost” wedding ring deep in a filing cabinet of their lives’ paraphernalia. But why would he lie and say he lost it when it was here the whole time? This innocuous discovery unravels everything she knows and believed about Julian and her marriage, and the one person she might turn to, Margot, is implicated as well.

I found Good Company, an enjoyable, if somewhat anticlimactic read. All the characters are in various places of their acting careers and there’s a lot of time spent with the titular theatre company Julian founds with a friend and its trials and tribulations which honestly, didn’t hold a lot of interest for me. However, where D’Aprix Sweeney excels is the family dynamics that she did so well in The Nest, also on display here, through alternating perspectives of Flora, Julian, their daughter Ruby, and Margot. I love how she wove their stories through college years, to present middle age, how they all found and lost themselves in the friendships they formed with one another. I love a narrative that explores friendships that become family and the forming and breaking of intense bonds with people who know you and grow with you from a young age. Sometimes the stories of a friendship and how we betray and fail each other against our best judgments and despite our keen efforts are like a marriage without the vows. That’s where I think Good Company had the most promise and ultimately fell short. Although I did enjoy this book very much, it stayed surface level when I would have liked a deep dive into the dark, blind places where love and friendship meet and decay. If there’s a betrayal I want to feel it. This was more akin to a good story arc on a prime time drama, with little staying power. There will be something more interesting, more dramatic, drawing more ratings next season, and we’ll remember this one like a fleeting blip.

ARC provided from the publisher via NetGalley for an honest review.