Asian American Literature Fans

By Stephen Hong Sohn

One night, after a particularly bad day not doing the revising thing, I picked up Rumaan Alam’s Rich and Pretty. Based upon general descriptions and the cover itself, I suspect that the novel was not unlike the Chicklit genre that we’ve seen come to prominence with titles like The Devil Wears Prada and Bridget Jones’s Diary. Alam’s novel does take some inspiration from these works, but diverges significantly especially in the narrative stylings. Alam employs a third person narrator that verges on stream of consciousness at times; this approach forces to do more work.  You simply have to slow down and take more time to follow along. The plotting and associated events seem simple enough: Sarah and Lauren are besties. Sarah is the rich one; Lauren is the pretty one. Sarah is the one getting married; Lauren is the maid of honor. Sarah is dependable; Lauren is more impulsive. Despite their differences, they seemingly have maintained strong bonds since their youthful teen years. Sarah’s marriage does add some new wrinkles into the equation, as this event pushes both to reconsider their pasts together and what different life trajectories they’ve taken.

Of the two, Lauren certainly comes off as the more complicated and prickly of the pair: you can see that Lauren wields her beauty without much self-consciousness, but it allows her a level of agency that creates its own dilemmas. Men easily fall in love with her and pursue her, but she just as easily finds herself bored, even by their persistent devotion, their many talents, their dependable, above average love making, their dependable, above average good looks. Much of the novel thus finds its traction in why it is that Sarah ended up becoming such good friends with Lauren, this woman who seems slightly dissatisfied, yet ultimately comfortable with where her life has taken her. There is one particularly compelling moment that really sealed the deal for me as a reader, that made me understood Lauren’s power: Sarah had simply invested in a friendship in which she saw something indisputably elegant in someone else. In other words, Lauren became a kind of platonic curation, someone Sarah had handpicked to come into her world, a world of shopping at Barney’s and bachelorette parties on tropical islands.

To be sure, Sarah isn’t some vapid socialite, but her elite status is assured. She comes from lineage, whereas Lauren does not, but Sarah sees in her a beauty that will only get richer in time, and the novel seems to ask us: who doesn’t want to surround themselves with beautiful things, even as we try to work out larger, perhaps more weighty social problems? Lauren, who is beautiful, who attracts then beautiful men to her, and doesn’t even realize this gravitational pull, finds recognition and upward mobility in this friendship with Sarah. Sarah’s wedding, her unexpected pregnancy, all take a backseat to this philosophical, stream-of-conscious meditation on non-biological sisterhood, the families we create beyond the bounds of traditional kinships. Somehow, through all of the excesses of the novel, the many lavish dinners and bridal events, we wonder about how this alternative sisterhood will manage to last. Though the conclusion did seem somewhat anti-climactic, Alam’s careful rendering of this asymmetrical relationship is no doubt a page-turner.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu