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Fiction

For This College Friend Group, Midlife Has Entered the Chat

Five women reckon with the joys, struggles and shifting priorities of adulthood in Emily Nemens’s new novel, “Clutch.”

Credit...Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos

Feb. 3, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET

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CLUTCH, by Emily Nemens

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In 1963, The New York Review of Books published a scathing parody of Mary McCarthy’s blockbuster novel of female friendship, “The Group,” under the byline Xavier Prynne.

“The Gang” is a brief set piece centered on a young woman’s “defloration,” and perfectly lampoons McCarthy’s style; it even parrots the conspicuously Scandinavian spelling of a paramour’s name that becomes a quirk of the novel. The sketch isn’t outrightly cruel, but it’s impossible to read without detecting an undertow of jealousy and affection — in other words, the competing feelings we reserve for our dearest friends.

“Prynne” turned out to be the critic Elizabeth Hardwick. Naturally, she and McCarthy were close.

The five friends in “Clutch,” Emily Nemens’s new novel, would recognize that cocktail of love and resentment, even if none have the gall or traitorous instincts to act on it. The story follows the women over an exceptionally busy period: three months bursting with a funeral, a concealed pregnancy, marital implosions and corgi trauma, and that’s just the start.

Now all 40 or close to it, Reba, Bella, Carson, Gregg and Hillary have been friends since college but rarely see one another. Their group chat is alive, though, which is where Bella, a Manhattan lawyer whose brain mulches anxiety and dissatisfaction into miserable confetti, declares that “something must be done.”

Reba, a former corporate efficiency expert (a.k.a. ruthless shrinker of work forces) now unemployed by choice and trying to get pregnant, suggests they converge in Palm Springs one mid-January weekend — clever, because no one on earth has plans that soon into the year, and fortunate for us. A desert getaway featuring psychedelic chocolates and poolside grousing is an ideal setting to meet the women and stress-test their dynamics.

Hillary, a physician hiding the depth of her estranged husband’s addiction issues, arrives from Chicago fearing her young son’s inevitable meltdowns. Carson, a writer living in Brooklyn (with roommates, no less), was once described by a reviewer as “Mary McCarthy but coked out.” She’s been vague about her long-gestating second novel and the family secret it stirred; as the only unmarried friend with the wobbliest finances, she can feel out of step with the others, and when cornered bickers like a younger, know-it-all sister.

Gregg, a progressive Texas legislator with national ambitions married to a Musk-esque tech gazillionaire, arrives last in Palm Springs after flying private. Shots of her breastfeeding in the State Capitol have transformed her into a firebrand feminist, though at home she’s wrestling her husband’s maniacal ego and losing. She inspires, at least in Bella, a flood of comparisons and envy; Gregg makes aging seem so easy, and looks great in a jumpsuit.

Thank God none of the women have it all. Nemens is meticulous in building each character’s universe, stacking them with blessings and obstacles alike. In Hillary’s, she draws an acutely sensitive portrayal of addiction. The willful blindness involved in loving an addict, the exasperation — it’s all there, and it’s devastating.

Once Hillary became a mother, her loyalties shifted from her spouse to their son: “This was whom she was meant to protect, not some grown-ass man whose medical specialty was ortho-disappointing her,” she thinks, and stops lancing the abscesses at her husband’s injection sites.

Nemens’s absurd, mordant outlook keeps the story from resembling a soap opera, as does her pitch-black sense of humor. At a house party full of caviar, one of the women, while immersed in a motherhood quandary, asks another if there’s something psychotic and untoward in her devouring piles of tiny eggs.

The sixth, silent member of their group is time itself. Nemens animates it like a breathing being, one we see “sprinting and creeping and speedwalking along.” Time has thwarted each of the women in banal and profound ways: from election and fertility cycles to traffic jams and the interminable wait for a life-changing letter.

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McCarthy once described “The Group” as a “history of the loss of faith in progress” for women, and a pessimistic reader could say the same of “Clutch.” Each character has been leveled by life in some way, resembling the Wayne Thiebaud model on the book’s cover — flattened by misogyny or malignant passive aggression or betrayal.

But I rooted for these women, loved them, and cherished the omniscient asides sprinkled throughout hinting at happy endings, even far beyond the novel. (A man Carson will soon encounter was “the last future boyfriend, but nobody knew that yet.”) What I wouldn’t give to know that my friends and I will end up OK, to have someone with Nemens’s feral intelligence mapping our paths. We’ll have to make do with A.I. astrology instead.

Midway through “Clutch,” in the waiting room of a health clinic we see “a small girl who was trying to assemble a complicated puzzle.” There’s time again, the child an innocent miniature of the women solving more existential problems in the office. After her procedure, one of the friends asks what she’s missed. Everything and nothing; the clock hands kept spinning around the dial.

CLUTCH | By Emily Nemens | Tin House/Zando | 400 pp. | $28

Joumana Khatib is an editor at The Times Book Review.

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