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Emily Nemens’ new novel Clutch is a celebration of enduring female friendship in all its messy glory. It opens with five women, best friends since college and now nearing forty, meeting in Palm Springs for a girls’ weekend after not seeing each other for nearly four years. They laugh, cry, take magic mushrooms, check in on children back home, keep secrets, fight, make up, and renew their bond, unaware of all the ways in which their lives are about to blow up and test their friendship.

Nemens throws a lot of terrible events at her characters – each painful, though mostly relatable, with one final turn that is truly shocking. With few exceptions, most of the men in their lives are jerks; it’s the bedrock of this friendship that gets them through tough times. No matter what these ladies have going on in their own lives, they are always there for each other.

I’m surprised that I ended up liking Clutch as much as I did, because the first few chapters were challenging to read. The narrator drops you abruptly into the women’s lives with no introduction, backstory, or context. The story immediately begins unfolding from there, so for the first few chapters I was spinning a bit trying to figure out who’s who and what’s going on. At some point though, it all came together and I was fully absorbed in the story. 

As a reader, you are not deep in the action. The narrator tells us about a character doing something fairly standard (eg, taking care of a child or aging parent, interacting with a spouse or roommate, seeing a doctor) which triggers a chapter full of rumination about a topic related (sometimes tangentially) to what she was doing. Parenting, aging, the environment, fertility, women’s reproductive rights, balancing work and motherhood, relationships with spouses and parents, how to define success, and existential questions about what they want out of life as they approach forty are all up for grabs. 

The scenes, if you can call them that, serve more as containers for this interiority and thematic exploration rather than as a structural devices to advance the plot. At first I found this annoying – why can’t we just have a traditional scene with dialogue and rising action? – but somehow the plot builds in spite of very little action taking place. 

It’s actually a brilliant and effective way of writing, and not easy to pull off as successfully as Nemens does here. The characters’ internal reflections feel meandering, but are in fact superbly layered and precisely observed, slowly building a complex portrait of these five women’s friendship, ambition, hopes, and dreams.

I recommend Clutch for readers who enjoy relatable stories about women’s friendship. Go in knowing that the writing style takes some getting used to, but the payoff is worth it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tin House for the ARC. All opinions are my own.