The Mutual Friend by Carter Bays

“The body determines … what you want and what you can have. This is all there is to life. In happy moments these things intersect - a sheet fits the bed, and the whole thing just works.”

The Mutual Friend is a book that seems to be flying way under the radar! So here's my personal plug and thank you @prhaudio for this complimentary copy!

This is narrated by George Newbern, a voice audiobook aficionados will recognize instantly - he is FANTASTIC. And he's particularly good with offbeat humor which this book most definitely has.

The Mutual Friend is hard to describe. It is a slow and meandering modern love story and a lesson about the importance of being present in a world that makes that very difficult. It illustrates how social media influences us every minute of every day, and it's really an expose of our times.

The setting is NYC and Bays does a great job making the city a character— so much of this novel spins off of the city and I don't think this story would have worked anywhere else.

Our main character is a young woman named Alice, who is planning to take the MCATs but is so thoroughly distracted by the siren song of her phone that she can't buckle down and focus. However we don't understand her motivation as she's so clearly not invested, and then the story goes off in all sorts of directions. The author does bring it back full circle via lots and lots of characters and a very long book - think just shy of 500 pages or 15 plus listening hours. I always speed up my audios, but nonetheless if I have one complaint, I do think this was too long.

The structure of the book is a series of snippets of the characters' lives that illustrate how we live in "6 degrees of separation" from others and it wanders -- it's a unique format and I assume it is by design to illustrate how choppy our lives are because of the distractions we all fight (or embrace).

I found this a great escape read because it didn't require my 100% attention and yet it was fun, touching and really well narrated. And, here is a good example that light books with substance do indeed exist!