There’s a reason why studios release movies that they think have a good chance at the Oscars late in the year. Memories are short, and sometimes a film that comes out in February is forgotten by December. Unfortunately, the same phenomenon can happen with books. But I’m making a note now not to forget about MUTUAL INTEREST when it comes time to compile “best books” lists at the end of the year.

I’ve been anticipating this book for a while. Memories may be short, but Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s debut, GLASSWORKS, was one of my favorites when it came out in 2023. That novel --- which traced a history of glass through multiple generations of a family --- was in some ways more structurally complex than MUTUAL INTEREST. But her sophomore effort is no less satisfying as its storytelling is just as compelling. The first section introduces readers to its primary characters. They don’t know each other then, but we meet them when they are still children or teenagers.

"MUTUAL INTEREST brilliantly explores the freedom that wealth affords its queer characters --- and the limitations that even wealth can’t overcome."

In 1898, Vivian Lesperance is a rambunctious rebel who is desperate to escape Utica and her parents’ meanness and poverty. She is equally desperate to avoid marriage to a man, which her parents posit as her only way out, and begins to recognize her attraction to other girls. Oscar Schmidt, who is 20 years older than Vivian, grows up in central Ohio, confused and embarrassed by his attraction to other boys and (much like Vivian) desperate to escape to a place where his sexual orientation is less likely to mark him as strange. He finds freedom --- and a career in the soap-making business --- in New York City.

Squire Clancy is a native New Yorker, raised in a loveless but fabulously wealthy household. As a child, his peculiarities are not around sexual orientation but his tendency to become transfixed by the strangest topics, from dinosaur fossils to sewer systems. As a young man, he becomes obsessed with the notion (outlandish at the time) of making scented candles. His path first crosses with Oscar’s after he corners the market on scented plants in order to conduct his experiments, stymying Oscar’s soap-making business.

Oscar and Vivian --- who connected at a couple of parties and saw in one another kindred spirits of a sort --- already have established something of a marriage of convenience by the time Squire enters their lives. What began as a professional rivalry soon develops into something very different, as the three of them enter into business --- and unconventional personal and professional relationships that serve each of them very well indeed.

As I mentioned, MUTUAL INTEREST is a fairly straightforward historical novel. It unfolds more or less chronologically, with storytelling that in some ways feels almost old-fashioned. But it’s also a thoroughly contemporary novel, inasmuch as it seeks to place fascinating, even inspiring, queer stories into the conventional Gilded Age narratives of wealth and power.

Vivian is a fascinating character. Finding herself on the margins of New York society, she learns through observation and her own shrewdness how to manipulate that society to her own ends, and she’s fabulously successful at doing so. But even as she utilizes her relationship with Oscar and Squire (and their romantic relationship with each other) to acquire professional power practically unheard of for a woman of her time, she also bumps up against barriers to that power.

Likewise, MUTUAL INTEREST brilliantly explores the freedom that wealth affords its queer characters --- and the limitations that even wealth can’t overcome.