Review: Good Company

Title: Good Company
Author: Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
Genre: Literary Fiction, Family Drama
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper Collins
Date Published: April 6, 2021
You can find it here: Bookshop.org

Synopsis:

Flora Mancini has been happily married for twenty years, but everything changes on the day of her daughter’s graduation when she finds her husband’s wedding ring – the one he says he lost thirteen years ago – in the bottom of an old filing cabinet. Now her entire relationship with her husband and her best friend, Margot, is in question.

Struggling for years to keep her husband, Julien’s, theatre company – Good Company – afloat in New York City, the pair decide to leave NYC for Los Angeles where they were able to find success with regular acting gigs. But is this perfect-from-the-outside marriage and life built entirely on lies? What happened the summer Julien claims to have lost his ring? And worse, what isn’t her best friend telling her? 

Overall Thoughts:

There is nothing inherently wrong with Good Company, it’s a fast paced, easy read that is the perfect accompaniment to a warm spring day reading outside. I enjoy Cynthia’s writing as it feels comforting – flowing easily and languidly along with strong characterization. She writes with heart and always brings a good dose of recognizable familial dramas and conflicts to the page.

My problem with Good Company is that it was really hard to feel any empathy whatsoever to this very entitled, very privileged, very wealthy, very, well, white, group of grownup whiners. From Margot – the very beautiful and successful TV actress whose successful hunky heart surgeon husband had a stroke and the result has just been so personally challenging for her and she’s just not paid enough millions and she just can’t stand being recognized in public and … To Flora, whose incessant concurrent bragging about “being the real deal” with her hubby to whining constantly about said hubby’s secrecy and history of affairs before they married… and then finds herself shocked to discover he’s been keeping secrets throughout their marriage? Don’t get me started on spoiled brat eighteen-year-old Ruby who takes the cake for the whole “the world revolves around me” attitude. 

All these characters lead glamorous, mega rich lives in the wealthy Hollywood hills of Los Angeles and have every privilege and opportunity to lead commanding lives, but instead spend the entirety of the book complaining. Overall, while it is a quick, undemanding read full of creature comforts, the entitlement of the characters made them completely unapproachable, incomprehensible and unsympathetic. There’s only so much whining I can stand from wealthy white millionaires. 

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