Obsession usually does an artist good. That concept she will be able to’t cease eager about, that uncompleted undertaking that retains her up at evening — such fixations compel her to create, focus her efforts, and hold 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 girls are pulled into one another’s orbits as kids and show unable, or unwilling, to extricate themselves. “Once I met Maria,” a middle-aged Ruth remembers, “I realized that with out an obsession life was inconceivable to dwell.” However repeatedly, her devotion to Maria retains Ruth from residing her life, convincing her she is a minor character in her personal story fairly than its writer, whilst her profession takes her into the supposed higher echelons of the artwork world.
Ruth’s fascination with Maria is prompt: As a nine-year-old, she notices her in line to buy college uniforms — they’re the one two Black ladies of their grade — and begins dreaming up their life collectively. The fact is extra difficult. Ruth, the reserved, self-effacing daughter of Kenyan immigrants, and Maria, a rebellious orphan residing along 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 offers her pencils and a sketchbook (a present, she remembers, that “opened a hatch that will not shut once more”), she begins drawing “impressionistic, muted half nudes” of Maria — “a woman whose face I’d seen so many occasions, from so many angles,” she says, “and who nonetheless appeared novel and even alarming relying on the sunshine of the hour.” Ruth deems the work “unambitious” in favor of being “allegiant to the mannequin in entrance of me.”
That is additionally how Ruth finally conceives of her life. Wambugu writes her narrator as detached to her personal company, content material “driving Maria’s coattails” from their Rhode Island prep college 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 lady,” although it’s unclear how a lot of her success emanates from her expertise fairly than the sheer pressure of her charisma, to not point out her monetary cushion. “It was so unsettling how nobody ever spoke about cash or how they have been making it,” Ruth observes after attending a gallery opening along with her artwork collector boss — her first introduction to the New York artwork scene — the place she seems like an intruder. Ultimately, Ruth finds a service job and a well-off boyfriend-turned-husband to subsidize her portray follow. By the novel’s finish, Ruth’s dedication 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 provides up some pointed critiques of the artwork world — what number of artists’ romantic companions act as their patrons, as an illustration, 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, satirically, first attracts the principle characters to careers within the arts, which Maria insists will be terribly profitable in the event you’re “any good.” As younger girls, 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 by way of; these are the novel’s most transferring and memorable moments. At one level, a teenaged Maria runs away from dwelling, and Ruth decides to make a missing-person flyer, drawing her pal as a way of “transmuting ache right into a satisfying image.”
“As I drew,” she says, “time didn’t go and I used to be not myself. It was great to fade on this manner.” 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 printed by Little, Brown and Firm and accessible on-line and thru impartial booksellers.
