NIGHTSTANDS & COFFEE TABLES

We Are All Good People Here by Susan Rebecca White

REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

“She wasn’t unhappy, exactly, but she wasn’t exactly happy either. Was adult life supposed to be happy? Mostly she was just uncertain how she had gotten where she was.

White’s novel is about friendship, but the story is told truthfully, how relationships shift and often turn away from each other, how we disappoint one another and later inspire one another. Daniella and Eve meet in college, a ritzy female institution in 1962, concerned with pledging the coveted sorority and making lifelong friends, diving head first into the artificial lives their parents have modeled for them. But when Daniella’s Jewish background results in her being dismissed from consideration to the sorority, Eve makes the ultimate sacrifice and thus leads the girls on an entirely different path, far away from the comforts and wholesome structure of home.

White explores the sacrifices female friends make for one another and the expectations we unfairly place on those who benefit from our sacrifice. She explores how one decision, often made prematurely, can alter our universe and the lives of those we hold dear. Eve molds from a destined debutant to a militant activist, joining a cult of sorts meant to challenge the government at a time of Civil Rights and Vietnam War resistance. While Daniella shares some of her friend’s views, she takes a more traditional route, getting engaged and attending law school, although not as common for women at the time. They’re both rebellious, but express their rebellion in entirely different ways, all the time resenting the methods of the other, and drifting further apart: “And then they lost each other. Again and again they lost each other.”

The shifts in narrative come suddenly. The opening of the story feels like a simple, quaint co-existence of two girls starting college, then takes a dark turn into the underground of Eve’s militant resistance against the state. Some situations are hard to read, involving animal cruelty and graphic language. The story shifts again when Eve and Daniella’s daughters become friends, both resembling and challenging their mothers, experiencing some of the same challenges in a world drastically changed, yet quite the same. Eve is hiding a secret only Daniella knows, and when it disrupts their daughter’s world, all the pieces come tumbling down. White shows how much we strive to hide our mistakes of the past, the lengths we’ll go to protect those we love, and how hard we are on each other when “We’re all good people here, just trying to muddle through as best we can.”

Daniella can never forgive Eve for going as far into rebellion as she did, and she can’t forgive herself for her lack of bravery. She both hates and envies Eve’s commitment to social revolution. Eve can’t understand Daniella’s conservative tendencies, yet embraces them when her world becomes unrecognizable. The twosome weave in and out of each other’s lives and yet remain connected, though not necessarily by choice. Sometimes we turn back to people we knew before only because we have nowhere else to go.