Fair ones is a lovely and completely engaging story about friendship and family that never got boring. It could be so otherwise but the writing and the characters make you want to listen twice to make sure you get all the nuances and humor. The narration is excellent!
It’s Brooklyn, NY. Claire is dead. Mara and Jenn, her college roommates and best friends are devastated. She was shot near her bus stop by a 13 year old. It was an accident. No charges But the pair is haunted, each in different ways by the loss. In the course of this, quite bizarrely, Claire’s two-exes-ago boyfriend Jace and his new girlfriend Lauren appear at the informal wake held at a bar after a prayer service Claire’s parents arranged. Not ready to shut things down, Mara and Claire accept when Jace and Lauren invite them back to the obnoxious guy’s very fancy apartment where there are illegal drugs, a hot tub with an unexpected occupant, a jelly fish aquarium cared for by a service and a safe room. Jace claims the art on the wall is an original. It’s all just too much. At the party, Mara and Jenn meet one of Clair’s friends from her book group whom they dub the “Memoirist” because he wrote a memoir about being raised among a collective of Jains. We eventually learn his name. Jenn adopts Clair’s Bassett Hound, Hombre. Together, Jenn and Mara take care of Claire’s things and send the sentimental, personal items back to June and Ernesto in Ohio.
The thing is, In the course of just this early part of the novel, you will alternatively be moved or laugh out loud at incidents in the bar between the prayer service and the party with Jace and Lauren. Think of: the details regarding a long line to the women’s room; how teachers from Claire’s school where she worked honor her; the incident where Jenn calls out (not telling who) upon meeting her. We quickly figure out cause they aren’t hiding anything how the women feel about and always felt about Jace, despite accepting his invitation.
So, you will be bemused during the party. You will be worried about and then laugh at what happens with the adoption of Hombre. Because Millet gets the little things right and these are whole people with constant moments of humor and worry. Is a bathrobe too personal to donate– like underwear? One character thinks so and that little detail is a dollop of relatable, observational humor, right? I’ll answer that: Right!
Meanwhile, while June, Ernesto and their son Caleb are mourning their daughter/sister in Ohio, Jenn and her boyfriend Richard, a UNC professor of literature and Mara, a tutor for high school kids with ambitious parents, are stumbling through their lives with no Claire. Enter, the rest of their lives for the next year or two.
Jenn’s parents live together in Connecticut, not so far from her home in Brooklyn but she is pretty much estranged from her father and only can tolerate her mother in small doses. Jenn’s mother is an all day drinker who she visits three times a year but never overnight. Her father lost all his money due to criminal activity that ripped off other people: She will never forgive him. But when you go to Connecticut to with Jenn, you get to hang out with Frederick the Cockatoo who considerably lightens the otherwise disastrous relationships. Jenn was raised in all that ill-gotten wealth and so has an unexpected array of past experiences, education and friends that pop up throughout the novel. Jenn and Richard are serious, but there’s something amiss and we don’t know why. At one point, we meet Richard’s daughter Lee. She plays a cameo roll of a perfectly normal sometimes lovely and sometimes judgmental and irritating sixteen year old. Also Richard’s brother from England makes one scene in the novel particularly special even though we never meet Bob now known as Sebastion personally. We are introduced to Bob and Richard’s stepmother and her former personal trainer with whom she’s lived for the ten years since their father’s death. Rent Free. In a place the sons inherited. Daddy knew about the boyfriend. So, it’s all in the details, this book. Little stories we each could have in our lives that are awful when they happen but become tellable with total humor. We get to laugh when they happen without waiting till they stop being awful.
Mara’s story is more poignant and sweet than Jenn’s. Still, there is humor in dementia too, as many of us have learned. And while we might be horrified by the incidents involving our loved ones with demential, they can become funny so long as no one was hurt. Mara was raised by her single mother Fern in Maine near the ocean. Her phone calls with Fern grow alarming when, during a call, Fern lets a pot boil on the stove to empty causing a fire in her kitchen and an injury to her arm she minimizes. Let’s all chorus together: “It’s nothing.” Off Mara goes to Maine, putting her students on remote tutoring to find that Fern is indeed slipping in and out of rationality and the arm is in fact “something.” Not good but hey, Mara and Jenn are in their 40s and their parents are just beginning to drift into becoming somewhat their responsibility. So, as Mara focuses on her mother and, with too much ease actually finds some solutions, Fern and her neighbors and friends in Maine dip into the novel in a lovely and fun way. This includes a doddering, deaf, messy eating elderly minister who –caricature that he is– gets filled into better humanity by those who know him and discuss him with others.
Along the way, a mystery is solved. Friends, exes, prior and new acquaintances, the police, teenagers, siblings, and parents all become important, playing critical roles through the voices of Mara and Jen. Yes, there are intentional plurals here, characters who cannot be mentioned in detail to avoid spoilers. They are all similarly satisfying. Okay. That’s it: I’m off to read Millet’s Pulitzer Prize Finalist novel that preceded this, “A Children’s Bible.” Just hit buy on Audible.
