Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s sophomore novel, Mutual Interest, is a high-drama romp through wealthy New York society in the early decades of the 1900s. With witty asides and tongue-in-cheek philosophical rambles, larger-than-life characters and vivid, melodramatic scenes, it reads a bit like a dishy soap opera.
Vivian Lesperance is determined to live life on her own terms—no easy task for a woman at the turn of the 20th century. She flees her provincial life in Utica, New York, for the big city, where she meets and marries Oscar Schmidt, a soap company manager in whom she sees a potential future. Vivian and Oscar join forces with Squire Clancey, heir to a fortune, and together they found Clancy & Schmidt, a personal care company that soon rises to astronomical success.
Protected by wealth, Clancey & Schmidt’s three founders form an unusual queer partnership that brings each of them a kind of freedom. Squire, whose eccentric interests and inability to adhere to social norms has left him at odds with his family, and Oscar, who has spent his life in a constant state of fear that his sexuality will be discovered, fall in love. Wrapped up in their newfound happiness, the men hardly notice Vivian, who runs Clancey & Schmidt like an empress while pursuing affairs with women all over the city.
Though we have access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings through Wolfgang-Smith’s omniscient narrator, the three leads remain at a distance. This choice serves the story well, as it’s not so much about individual people as it is about the building of a commercial empire. It’s about consequence and sacrifice, power and secrecy, and how personal choices so often spiral out of control, changing—or destroying—other lives in unexpected ways.
Though it delves into the very real challenges facing women and queer people in the early 20th century, Mutual Interest never takes itself too seriously. It’s an unconventional saga about the cost of ambition, the relentless American thirst for success, and the invisible, often strange truths that lurk behind the public facades of people with power.
