Emily Nemens

Five college friends on the cusp of turning forty meet for a weekend in Palm Springs. They are all going through things, but their friendship is steady and restorative. Reba, daughter of extremely wealthy parents, longs for a child but hasn't jumped into IVF or any medical intervention. Hillary is a plastic surgeon who spends her days doing nose jobs and her evenings caring for her son. She's begun the process of divorcing her husband, who is back in rehab again. Bella is a lawyer on the show more partner track of a prestigious New York firm. Her current case is her make or break chance to be promoted. The stress of it has put her marriage on the back burner, and she sometimes asks her husband to pitch in more than he is interested in doing. Gregg is a Texas legislator married to a techbro billionaire, with a large staff to care for her house and her children. She has it all, including four corgis, but she's tired. And there's Carson, the poor member of their group, although poor in this world doesn't mean she can't afford to live as a writer in New York and to not have to take a regular job. As the story moves forward, it also folds backwards to explain their pasts, as they all face pivotal moments in their lives.

The strength of this novel lays in the writing style which bobs and weaves through each paragraph, moving forwards and back in time, curving around to add small details and moving rapidly between the five characters. Nothing except the story is straight-forward. It forces the reader to slow down in moments of high drama to look at the small details about a character's past or detour away from the action to focus on small details. It can be frustrating, but there's no question that it raises the tension. The downside of this approach is that the payoff often doesn't match the tension the author has created. And in the final chapters, the solutions are too easy and nice, but for expensively-educated women living financially secure lives, maybe harsher consequences are impossible. show less

This novel of five college friends is like an overpacked suitcase: some items could be shed, but the necessities are included. Happily, the book opens with a cast list, defined as "in the group chat": Bella, mother of two, a Manhattan corporate lawyer whose entire career is riding on a single case; Carson, author of one moderately successful book, waiting to hear from her agent on her second, living in a shambolic hippie-type commune in Brooklyn; Gregg, a former actress and Texas state show more representative, mother of two kids, four corgis, and wife to an Elon Musk wanna-be; Hillary, physician, mom of one and wife to a frequently overdosing husband; and Reba, trying IVF desperately at age 41. Each woman gets multiple spotlights in their own voices, and that's where the too-much comes in: knowing what's going on does not have to include every single thought. Over the course of Nov 2022 - March 2023, there are deaths, abortions, divorces, pregnancies, crack-ups, failures, and shocks, along with tantalizing glimpses of the further future. I became more and more invested as their personalities became more vivid and sympathetic. show less

Real Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five women, friends for twenty years, as they go through the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?

As undergrads, Reba, Hillary, Carson, Gregg, and Bella formed the kind of rare bond that college brochures promise—friendship that lasts a lifetime. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country show more but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID and childbirth and midcareer challenges, but no one can anticipate what’s coming down the pike.

The five women converge on Palm Springs for a long overdue Gregg, who has forged a path as a progressive Texas legislator, is facing a huge decision about her political future. Reba, who moved back to the Bay Area after decades away, is deep in IVF treatments while caring for her aging parents and navigating a San Francisco she hardly recognizes. Hillary's medical career in Chicago is going great—but at home, her husband's struggles with addiction have derailed their life. In New York City, Bella faces the biggest case in her career as a litigator while her home life crumbles around her, and across the river in Brooklyn, Carson is working on a new novel as well as forging a possible relationship with the father she's never met.

Twenty years into their shared friendship, the stakes are higher than ever, and they must help one another reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult. Clutch is a big, beautiful, and deeply absorbing novel that asks how much space and heart we can give to our friends and our families, and what space we can save for ourselves.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I wanted to love this story.

I did not love this story. I *made* myself finish it. I was pissed off at these privileged women taking their genuine, and genuinely intractable, problems so utterly seriously. There was no perspective checking; no one said to Gregg, for example, "you can fix this personal issue if you're willing to reframe your worries about it," no one said "Reba, there are other ways to get this thing you want quit fixating on it as a failure."

When you've known each other for decades, you ought to be able to say stuff like that. You ought to be the perspective-checkers in each others' lives, as a privilege of the groups' friendship longevity. It ought to be relatively easy to see the solution your bud's ignoring or unaware she should give more thought to. But all five of these women are self-absorbed so don't make that kind of effort.

I finished all eleventy bajillion pages because I really liked Author Nemes' use of stream-of-consciousness narration, as it gave me the immediacy that saved the story from permanent exile. I might not've liked the women but I sure knew them. I was not at all convinced these women would make the terrible choices they did in their men. Not one of the men was worth the powder it would take to blow him up. That's very unlikely; these are high-powered women, educated, smart; they would not *all* have fallen for the idiotic, nasty men portrayed here.

I've read many versions of this gang o' pals narrative before. I was not sold on the merits of this iteration of that evergreen story. I really wanted to be. show less

Spring training is a time of hope and renewal in baseball, when fans of even the most inept teams allow themselves to dream that this might, at long last, be The Year. It’s no less so for the players themselves, and the other people whose lives revolve in and around the game.

Emily Nemens’ The Cactus League (2020) plays upon some classic themes of a baseball novel—the ways off-field struggles translate into on-field performance, the repercussions of high expectations and celebrity, the show more inevitable physical decline and its accompanying mental rollercoaster. But she shines her spotlight into corners of the game rarely explored by writers in this genre, and that makes for compelling reading beyond the usual audience of sports fans.

The Cactus League is structured like a baseball game, in nine “innings” that are not so much chapters in a seamless chronological narrative as they are interconnected stories, told from the viewpoint of different characters. Events are sometimes recounted more than once, from different points of view, and each re-telling adds depth to our understanding of what happened.

Each chapter/inning opens with ruminations (seemingly excerpts from an unpublished memoir) by an old sportswriter who was involuntarily retired. Like a good leadoff hitter, the old sportswriter sets the table at the start of each inning. He blends the history of Arizona from before the Ice Age and human settlers with what’s happening on and off the field in today’s desert environment, where the Los Angeles Lions are working themselves into shape to make a run at the World Series. Each excerpt builds upon the previous to make it clear that Lions star outfielder Jason Goodyear is the sun around which the satellite characters in each subsequent narrative revolve.

Other characters include a former big league hitting coach whose career trajectory is on the downhill side, former wife of a professional ballplayer and current groupie, who loves the game of baseball even more than the men she collects each spring, the personal assistant to Jason Goodyear’s agent, who tasks her with the job of keeping an eye on his prime client, the black partial owner of the Lions who sees himself as a mentor to up-and-coming black players, a pitcher trying to work his way back from arm surgery, a hotshot rookie from whom too much is expected in his first spring training, the wives and girlfriends of Lions players who are expected to put their own lives on hold so their men can focus all their attention on baseball, and the aging stadium organist whose own career never got out of the minor leagues.

Can the agent save his most famous client from himself? Can the groupie find someone to save her from a lifestyle that she’s aging out of? Can the players on the edge of reaching the next level save their careers? Do some people have to be sacrificed so that others can realize their dreams?

In baseball as in life there are only winners and losers. The trick is not to get caught on the wrong side of that line. show less