(courtesy Text Publishing)
Pretty much everyone on the planet sets out on this somewhat strange journey called life aiming for and expecting the best.
After all, who wants to aim lower than that? It’s a one-shot deal and you’re hardly going to launch yourself into the fray hoping and planning for the worst.
Or at least, something sub par; yet despite her best efforts, and the fact that by any measure she has a rather wonderful life, Lorrie Hope, the protagonist of Eleanor Elliott Thomas’s The Opposite of Success, feels like sub par is precisely what she has intended up with and she really isn’t sure, as she near 40, exactly what she needs to do about it.
First the good points – lovely, caring husband? Tick. Great, charming kids. Also tick. A job where she’s head of a project that has the potential to green up the city in which she lives and to play a role, albeit small, in combatting climate change? Tick, tick and emphatically tick.
If that’s where the life assessment stopped, Lorrie could justifiably stayed life well and truly nice done; but the truth is, she’s been at her job for 12 years and she’s not sure why and the promotion she’s gone for, which she’s supposed to go for she thinks, may not be what she wants at all.
The million dollar question, which crystallises in one ever-more dishevelled and existentially messy day, is what the hell she does instead?
‘Oof, stop it, Clara, you’re going to break my ribs,’ he said, rolling her off and sitting up. ‘Sounds like a big day, Lo. Do I need to buy some champagne?’
‘Well—I don’t want to be too cocky, I don’t know if it’s all been formally approved.’ She turned to him, a small smile escaping the corners of her mouth. ‘ But what the hell, buy the champagne. It’s good to be prepared.’
If you have ever asked yourself that question, and especially if you’re a woman trying to have it all, then you will find a great deal to love and adore about the riotously insightful delights of The Opposite of Success.
It absolutely nails what it’s like to get to a certain in life and feel like your present is deficient, your past is rushing back to greet you in ways you really wish it wouldn’t, and your best friend of many years standing is suddenly grappling with a nascent love affair that may not be the healthiest thing for her.
Especially because the person powering that embryonic romantic and sexual connection is far too closely connected to your bestie and which, if it all comes out in the wash, as it does on one fateful day, has the potential to seriously derail your life, your friendship and just about everything good you’ve managed to cobble together in your life.
Everything stands to get truly, awfully awry and the fact that it all comes exploding out on one of the biggest days of Lorrie’s life and career, when her pet project is getting its big launch courtesy of its backer, mining magnate Sebastian Glup, actually fits the way life is rarely a respecter of our timetables or wishes and doesn’t whatever the hell it pleases, aided, despite our best and lofty dreaming, by some very poor decision-making, past or present, on our part.
(courtesy Text Publishing)
Yes, folks, if you haven’t realised it already, we are our own worst enemies, and while life for Lorrie and Alex is as apocalyptically bad as it may feel, perception often wins out over reality in this helter-skelter race to make something good of our four score years and ten.
As truth telling goes, The Opposite of Success is a brilliantly-told joy, a dose of cold water to any idea that we have it all together, or that we are likely to herd all those existential cats anytime soon.
Packed full of the sort of life truths that we need but don’t necessarily want to hear, The Opposite of Success is clever and funny in equal measure, brutally honest about how we often fall short of our lofty life ideals but also forgivingly understanding about our capacity to reach that brass ring we’re aiming for and acrobatically and balletically hang successfully on.
Much of the appeal of the novel lies in how wonderfully relatable Lorrie is.
She makes some dumb decisions and melts down in ways that are not particularly professionally advantageous but then haven’t we all at some point had that happen ot us?
None of us wants to fall apart or reach a point where life feels like a complete and utter trainwreck – again, it’s the “feels” part of that phrase that’s important; how we see things and how they are don’t always and no amount of comparing the two can stop the internal mourning and condemnation – but it happens and while it can often then snowball into ever worse realisations and soberingly angst-ridden moments, it a very human thing to have happen.
In her memory, Lorrie took another few steps towards Dana and Glup, and then there were a series of images she couldn’t place in any order: Dana’s hand trembling—a finger tightened—Glup falling to his knees—a person leaping onto the stage—there was screaming—
And at some point, there came a sound loud enough to break a hole in the very sky itself.
That’s why The Opposite of Success is such a release and a joy to read.
We’ve all been there, and it’s the realness of the novel, in all its hilariously flawed glory, that makes it so entertainingly, refreshingly, liberatingly appealing and a pleasure to read.
It frees us from the idea that we’re always going to be perfect and have it all together and that a life that isn’t as good as we want it to be isn’t worth as much as we thought it was; in fact, as Lorrie discovers, the sort of life busting day that she has in The Opposite of Success is pretty much par for the course, if extraordinary, and while she really rather wishes she hadn’t had such a terrible reckoning, it might end up not being so bad after all.
But try telling that to the Lorrie in the centre of quite possibly the worst day of her life, where all her old assumptions are blown to smithereens, assured certainties are rendered as null and void and life gets the kind of reality check none of us particularly want.
In the end, The Opposite of Success is a bracingly real take on how life can appear to be one thing, can be quite another and we stuck awkwardly and messily in the middle, have to figure out what to do next, not just in the midst of it all but in the aftermath where life won’t be quite the same again.