I very much enjoyed Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s whimsical new novel, Mutual Interest, the story of three queer misfits who build a business empire based on soap and perfume (later they add scented candles). Set in Manhattan at the turn of the century, it examines business from a queer point-of-view.

Mutual Interest is not just about work: it also explores loneliness, queer love, and the imaginative branding of “personal care products.” Wolfgang-Smith is in-our-face about some of the less attractive details of gay culture, including Oscar’s cruising in a sailor suit. Vivian loves to giggle and mock high society with her upper-class girlfriends, but she also visits lesbian clubs that are slightly seedy.

Vivian understands the rich – she used to live with an Italian singer, Sofia, who took her to all the glitzy parties – but she is unemployed and desperate, so her meeting with Oscar, director of the Manhattan branch of an Ohio-based soap factory, is providential. She helps him turn the business into a thriving national conglomerate. Soon they are invited to high society dinners and balls. And when Vivian finds an opportunity to make another valuable contact, she grabs the chance: at an inaugural exhibition of the walrus pond at the Aquarium, she brings together Oscar and Squire, a science nerd and heir to a vast fortune. (She pushes them into the walrus pool.)

Vivian is Cupid for everyone but herself. Soon the men are a couple, and spend their leisure traveling in search of antiques (Oscar collects hatpins), while Vivian stays behind and oversees the factory and the finances.

Oscar and Squire are contented, but Vivian steals the show. Yet she has no real friends, let alone lovers. After years of toil, she has morphed into a lonely, manipulative harridan. She has missed the chance of love and relationships through her obsessive work and tyrannical management of all details.

And then everything goes awry: she attempts to arrange a date with Sofia who has a singing engagement at a theater in California, and is devastated when Sofia doesn’t answer. Then a guerilla theater wrecks her stilted industrial film, and the acrobat/actress who plotted the disruption rejects her advances.

Throughout the novel, the narrator alludes to the three main characters as “pins in the map.” Pins and hatpins, and possibly sharper pins, but Vivian is the main pin. There are some very sad scenes, but, fortunately, whimsy is never far away, and authorial asides help us accept an unacceptable ending.

HOW I CAME TO READ THIS

I read this likable book for all the wrong reasons. In a splendid review at The Washington Post, the critic compared Wolfgang-Smith’s Mutual Interest to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. I’ve read The House of Mirth three times. I’ve read all of Wharton’s novels. Naturally, I had to read this book. But Vivian and Wharton’s Lily Bart have nothing in common: the former is obsessed with business, the latter with the hunt for a husband and an income.

So where did the reference to Wharton come from?

Perhaps it started with a review at Kirkus. There is a blurb from Kirkus Reviews on the cover: “Edith Wharton or Henry James, with more camp and a winking tome.” But the reviewer actually says, “Wolfgang-Smith approaches historical fiction as a costume ball, affecting a fizzy, omniscient narration: At the book’s most fun, it’s Edith Wharton or Henry James, with more camp and a winking tone.“

Less highbrow publications have a more down-to-earth take on this smart historical novel

Bookpage calls Mutual Interest “a high-drama romp through wealthy New York society in the early decades of the 1900s. With witty asides and tongue-in-cheek philosophical rambles, larger-than-life characters and vivid, melodramatic scenes, it reads a bit like a dishy soap opera.”

Shelf Awareness says: “This is a novel of families won and lost, love, envy, and betrayal told in a remarkably fresh and entertaining way, with immersive period detail and compelling emotional stakes. Mutual Interest is essential reading for lovers of historical and accessible literary fiction.”

We wondered what the author, Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, might say. In an interview at Daily Nerd, she reveals that she loves to read novels of manners by Edith Wharton and E. M. Forster. And she seems to want to emulate them.

But more important, we think, is her use of history.

But the biggest single historical inspiration for Mutual Interest—a tidbit of trivia with which I took enormous liberties—comes from the origin of Procter & Gamble. William Procter and James Gamble were initially rivals, a candlemaker and soap maker in competition for their industries’ common raw materials. They happened to marry into the same family, however, and were thus persuaded to form a partnership. Among many other changes, I escalated things into a true love story and invented the character of Vivian, as a mastermind to orchestrate it all—but there’s a seed of historical enemies-to-partners truth there.