Obsession typically does an artist good. That concept she will be able to’t cease enthusiastic about, that uncompleted venture that retains her up at evening — such fixations compel her to create, focus her efforts, and preserve her returning to the desk, the stage, the studio. However not all obsessions are equally generative.
Stephanie Wambugu’s stimulating debut novel, Lonely Crowds (2025), facilities on Ruth, a painter, and Maria, a filmmaker. The 2 ladies are pulled into one another’s orbits as youngsters and show unable, or unwilling, to extricate themselves. “When I met Maria,” a middle-aged Ruth remembers, “I learned that without an obsession life was impossible to live.” However again and again, her devotion to Maria retains Ruth from residing her life, convincing her she is a minor character in her personal story quite than its creator, whilst her profession takes her into the supposed higher echelons of the artwork world.
Ruth’s fascination with Maria is immediate: As a nine-year-old, she notices her in line to buy faculty uniforms — they’re the one two Black ladies of their grade — and begins dreaming up their life collectively. The truth is extra sophisticated. Ruth, the reserved, self-effacing daughter of Kenyan immigrants, and Maria, a rebellious orphan residing together with her unstable aunt, develop a quick however lopsided relationship. Ruth’s infatuation with the precocious Maria, which straddles the platonic and romantic, goes unrequited, her gestures of care largely unreturned.
However Ruth’s obsession later serves her as a budding teenaged artist: Maria turns into her muse. When Ruth’s father provides her pencils and a sketchbook (a present, she remembers, that “opened a hatch that would not close again”), she begins drawing “impressionistic, muted half nudes” of Maria — “a girl whose face I’d seen so many times, from so many angles,” she says, “and who still appeared novel and even alarming depending on the light of the hour.” Ruth deems the work “unambitious” in favor of being “allegiant to the model in front of me.”
Writer Stephanie Wambugu (photograph by Elijah Townsend)
That is additionally how Ruth finally conceives of her life. Wambugu writes her narrator as detached to her personal company, content material “riding Maria’s coattails” from their Rhode Island prep faculty to varsity at Bard and past. As they pack up Ruth’s childhood bed room, Maria tells her to throw away her treasured drawings of Maria; extra allegiant to her mannequin than to her work, Ruth complies. Ruth’s passivity is rendered in prose that may really feel limp or frustratingly distant, even because it’s sometimes dotted with glowing turns of phrase.
The holding sample continues after faculty, when Ruth follows Maria to New York Metropolis. There, Maria’s rich girlfriend bankrolls her movies and helps flip her into an artwork world “it girl,” although it’s unclear how a lot of her success emanates from her expertise quite than the sheer pressure of her charisma, to not point out her monetary cushion. “It was so unsettling how no one ever spoke about money or how they were making it,” Ruth observes after attending a gallery opening together with her artwork collector boss — her first introduction to the New York artwork scene — the place she appears like an outsider. Ultimately, Ruth finds a service job and a well-off boyfriend-turned-husband to subsidize her portray apply. By the novel’s finish, Ruth’s willpower to dwell in Maria’s shadow means she will be able to hardly acknowledge, not to mention take pleasure in, her personal success as an artist.
Lonely Crowds gives up some pointed critiques of the artwork world — what number of artists’ romantic companions act as their patrons, as an example, or how Black artists are transformed into fashionable tokens. Wambugu’s writing is most astute, nevertheless, when depicting the highly effective lure of social mobility. It’s the promise of being lifted out from their hardscrabble surrounds that, mockingly, first attracts the principle characters to careers within the arts, which Maria insists may be terribly profitable in case you’re “any good.” As younger ladies, they appear extra enamored with the thought of being artists than with making artwork.
However glimmers of Ruth’s real love of portray sporadically peek via; these are the novel’s most shifting and memorable moments. At one level, a teenaged Maria runs away from house, and Ruth decides to make a missing-person flyer, drawing her good friend as a way of “transmuting pain into a satisfying picture.”
“As I drew,” she says, “time did not pass and I was not myself. It was wonderful to vanish in this way.” Artwork, like her relationship with Maria, is one other type of self-erasure, however a generative one. Even when folks don’t, artwork loves you again.
Lonely Crowds (2025) by Stephanie Wambugu is revealed by Little, Brown and Firm and accessible on-line and thru unbiased booksellers.
