Man’s Best Friend

Be your own BFF.

The inside flap of this debut novel asks “What would you be willing to lose to have the life you always wanted?” Interesting question. If you give up something meaningful wouldn’t its absence be a constant aching hole in your fabulous new life? Maybe, maybe not.

Alana B. Lytle’s Man’s Best Friend grabbed my interest from the start because of the intriguing main character, El. A young and disaffected New Yorker trying to make her dreams come true? I’m in. El’s an aspiring actress with a bakery job that barely pays, and she lives in a crappy apartment with a roommate she barely cares about. At first I just wanted to know where the story was going but it turned into more; Lytle surprised me with her insightful writing and the novel went deeper than I expected.

El’s backstory is revealed early and it’s rough: her father had an entire separate family – another woman and another daughter – and he ended up choosing them and leaving El and her mom behind. Is this the seed of her detachment or was she always that way? While her history isn’t the main focus of the novel, tidbits like this shore it up and give El dimension.

El attended a year of private school on scholarship and made some superficial rich friends. She attends a party at one of their homes in the Hamptons and accidentally leaves her license behind (bored, cutting lines of coke in the bathroom).  The overly attentive Bryce finds it, returns it and here we go. He’s a rich NY finance dude and is smitten with El. Before she knows it they’re a thing and she’s all caught up, ignoring her friends and their warnings, calling in to work and moving away from her old life.

Lytle’s a screenwriter and she nailed the scenes with El and her actor friends out together, drinking and partying. They were the most alive and cinematic to me. But while El’s friends embrace the grind of auditions and rejections, El is losing steam. When she meets Bryce she’s wondering if she’ll ever make it and where she’ll end up.

…she had an image of herself down the line…midforties, a marketing manager at an artisanal coffee company…feeling young and unrealized still but, oh, she would seem together, power bill on autopay, cholesterol normal, dreams not deferred but shrunken, bite-sized as the amount of carbs she allowed herself in a day…

El allows herself to be swept up by Bryce and his money, though she’s not even sure if she likes him. He’s awkward, creepy and extremely possessive, inviting her to move in way too soon and surprising her with a trip to Paris. It’s too much but difficult to resist, the wealth and privilege softening her edges.

In Paris El realizes that there are aspects of the city that everyone knows from movies and media, so even though it’s her first time there’s a familiar feeling. But then in one of my favorite moments she’s wandering through a museum garden when she discovers a hidden vineyard next to it, private and tucked away.

Everything else she’d seen on the trip she’d been expecting… But there were surprises throughout this city – throughout the whole world!

I think it was the exclamation point that got me – El’s a New Yorker, she’s hard and jaded, but still open and innocent enough to be excited about possibilities. She’s also smart enough to ask questions –

…every window on every street contained a different life – was anyone making choices, or were they just shuttled from one year to the next buffeted by circumstance?

Man’s Best Friend is a mystery, a thriller, a fractured fairy tale. There are bitchy girls, a stalker, death and murder, and a character who gains strength as the story twists and the plot thickens. El might be a failed actress but she still has skills and is a keen observer. She can be who you want her to be but lookout for those simmering resentments.

Toward the end El learns some truths about her new love. We can see her detachment shift as she wakes up to her agency and clarifies her desires. A scene with one of her private school friends shows she’s not tamping her feelings down anymore –

It was terrible and electric to be so angry. For several long moments, they were one breath away from violence. The idea of hitting, or being hit, hung in the air, a dense, crackling cloud.

In a chilly and stunning ending El puts it all together and comes fully into her own power, embodying the role she was born to play. Brava.