Obsession usually does an artist good. That concept she will’t cease interested by, that uncompleted venture that retains her up at night time — such fixations compel her to create, focus her efforts, and maintain 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 kids and show unable, or unwilling, to extricate themselves. “Once I met Maria,” a middle-aged Ruth recollects, “I discovered that with out an obsession life was unattainable to stay.” However again and again, her devotion to Maria retains Ruth from dwelling 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 instantaneous: As a nine-year-old, she notices her in line to buy college uniforms — they’re the one two Black women of their grade — and begins dreaming up their life collectively. The truth is extra difficult. Ruth, the reserved, self-effacing daughter of Kenyan immigrants, and Maria, a rebellious orphan dwelling 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 recollects, that “opened a hatch that might not shut once more”), she begins drawing “impressionistic, muted half nudes” of Maria — “a lady whose face I’d seen so many instances, 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 in the end conceives of her life. Wambugu writes her narrator as detached to her personal company, content material “using 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 school, 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 woman,” although it’s unclear how a lot of her success emanates from her expertise quite than the sheer drive 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 together with her artwork collector boss — her first introduction to the New York artwork scene — the place she appears like an outsider. Finally, 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 stay in Maria’s shadow means she will 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 stylish 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, paradoxically, first attracts the primary characters to careers within the arts, which Maria insists might be terribly profitable for those who’re “any good.” As younger ladies, they appear extra enamored with the concept of being artists than with making artwork.
However glimmers of Ruth’s real love of portray sporadically peek by means 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 buddy as a method 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 fantastic to fade on this means.” Artwork, like her relationship with Maria, is one other type of self-erasure, however a generative one. Even when individuals 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.
