Women’s friendships can be powerful, messy, obsessive, romantic, indispensable—sometimes all at once. In Take What You Can, the latest novel by Naima Coster, we follow two Black girls who meet during a college program in France, become best friends, and eventually plan to end up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, where, in their 30s, they raise their daughters together. There are echoes of Tayari Jones’s novel, Kin, which also examines the impact of class differences on motherless girls, but I’m more reminded of the competitiveness and devotion of Lenu and Lila in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, with a dose of Edi and Ash’s gallows humor in Catherine Newman’s We All Want Impossible Things, some of the ride-or-die zaniness of Abbi and Ilana in Broad City, and the tensions and reconciliation between Issa and Molly in Insecure. Popular, wealthy influencer Milly, still suffering from the death of her beloved single mother years ago, lives a superficially perfect life, while struggling writer Val contends with an abusive childhood and neglectful husband. Coster pulls off the challenging trick of transitioning smoothly from third person limited in Milly’s voice to third person limited in Val’s, sometimes sentence to sentence. What is at first occasionally confusing quickly serves the purpose of balance and fairness: we come to see each woman through the other’s eyes—almost at the same time as we experience her own thoughts—and we come to know them as individuals without favoring one over the other: both are flawed, frustrating, secretive in different ways, perhaps ultimately unknowable. How the women move towards freedom from expectations and towards honesty in their relationships with men is explored, but it is their love for each other—deep-seated, with a frisson of the erotic, burdened by perceived betrayals—that is the book’s primary focus.
The catalyst for the cleaving—in both meanings of the word: adhering and splitting—in Milly and Val’s friendship is a mysterious older woman, Helene, who introduces the girls to a life of adventure, sponsors their travels, and inhabits the role of mother figure, indulgent aunt, and problematic benefactor. The story moves back and forth in time from early years in France with Helene to present day in Brooklyn, where the women have given birth to their daughters. The counterpoint to the character of the sophisticated Helene is their shared nanny, Cleo, who represents the allure of lost youth, and, more intriguingly, true financial stress unalleviated by the “right” college degree or wealthy friends. The unexpected ways that Val and Milly interact with Helene and Cleo shed light on their individual limitations and the trajectory of their friendship. Take What You Can delves into issues of class more so than race; Coster is interested in all the ways that women make a living, get ahead, are vulnerable or independent. Much of this is inevitably tied to the mothers they left behind (or who left them) and to their identities as mothers themselves. Although the book contains plenty of drama and hot-button issues, Val and Milly resist our expectations, which adds layers to this specific, singular friendship.
Strategically scattered throughout are scenes of water—gorgeous swimming holes, baptismal dunks, treacherous seas—representing liberation, loss, danger, rebirth. The image of the girls leaping naked, hands clasped, into cold, clear water defines the purest element of their connection, one that is cleaved at points in the book, and, we imagine, for the rest of their lives. As during the many delicious meals spread before them (Take What You Can’s fabulous cover art embodies literal and figurative nourishment), Val and Milly raise a glass to jumping together despite their differences in this entertaining, often surprising book about the multitudinous nature of women’s friendship.
