I’m enjoying every new book by Laura Lippman more than the previous one, which shows that she is growing as a writer. Prom Mom is her best novel so far.
One of the characters is a rich, very woke, child-free woman who obsesses over “words that kill” (“shouldn’t we say differently figured instead of disfigured?”), frets over “the privilege conferred by her whiteness “, adores her Peloton bike, sees racism everywhere, and mistakes her menopause for “long COVID”.
I wondered why Lippman suddenly came out with an acid parody of wokeness but it turns out she was writing this book during the collapse of her marriage to the mega woke David Simon. As a rich, successful writer, Lippman can’t openly say anything against leftist beliefs but her book speaks for her. Simon must have really gotten on her nerves with the endless virtue-signaling.
Mind you, in the very last 3 or 4 pages of the book Lippman does try to give a woke slant to the novel. But it’s too late. After 300 pages of showing the outlandish pretentiousness, triviality and smugness of the woke, nothing can change the overall impact of the novel.
Prom Mom is a COVID novel. You can see in it exactly why the rich childless people adored the lockdowns. I was curious about the moment when the first COVID novels would drop, and it’s finally here. Finding out how these spoiled creatures experienced the lockdowns, how they turned the lockdowns into an opportunity for even greater consumerism, how they cared not a whit about the suffering all this caused – all that is very sobering.
This is a novel where every single person except for the little baby murdered in the first pages is utterly despicable. All characters are nasty. But what do you expect? These are people who receive million-dollar inheritances and give $75,000 Christmas gifts while bleating about how victimized they are. American writers love to write about the petty dramas of the wealthy but Lippman does it in a way that shows how repellent these people are.
It’s a good book, people. I read it on the day it was published and couldn’t put it down until I was through. This was the day when I was the parent of record of three kids, so my interest in the book had to be high for me to plough through it so fast. Looking at the world through the eyes of these rich leftists is truly something. I kind of feel bad for them now.
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