Clutch
Emily Nemens
378 pages
Published on Feb 3rd, 2026
Tin House
🥚🥚
Amazon | GoodReads
Clutch is a meandering novel about five white upper middle class women who have been friends since college, navigating careers, family, relationships, parenthood, politics and post-pandemic malaise, often unsuccessfully. I was invited to read it by the publisher, and because I normally enjoy stories about female friendships, and there weren’t many reviews up at the time, accepted an Advance Review Copy. Unfortunately I didn’t realise how long it was, over 9 hours according to my kindle, or that it would take me a month to finish. It reminded me why I don’t enjoy much American literary fiction – so many cultural references that mean nothing to an international reader, meaning you either have to look them up, slowing it down still further, or carry on with the vague dissatisfaction of not knowing what she means. (That happened even when I did google some names. I guess you had to be there.)
Despite it featuring a large number of characters, and spanning an eventful couple of months in all the women’s lives, there’s no plot to speak of. They meet up for a reunion in Palm Springs in January, then go back to their lives – Reba is trying to get pregnant, Gregg is considering a run for Congress, Hillary struggling to balance single motherhood with a demanding surgical career, Bella is a defence attorney gearing up for a trial, and Carson is hoping to reconnect with the father she never knew while finishing a novel. Unfortunately they’re all so unlikeable that it was hard to care about any of them, and the men in their lives are even worse (possible exception Terrence, who we barely get to know.) One of the men commits an act of such despicable animal cruelty and gets away with it – the animals in question do survive, but in a book which keeps mentioning Crime & Punishment, I was hoping for some serious punishment…
The writing is elegant and flowery if you like that kind of thing – so many metaphors! It covers a range of issues – abortion, addiction, the glass ceiling, the stress of being not quite as wealthy as your besties… The women are constantly competitive, supportive in theory, but quick to bitch about one another. I didn’t find it funny at all, and was bored for much of it – it did help me get back to sleep on some of my insomniac episodes. I contemplated DNFing but don’t like to do that with an ARC, and wanted to know how it would turn out. I shouldn’t have wasted my time, the conclusion is infuriatingly open-ended. I would’ve liked to think it was just me feeling disappointed and unsatisfied by this, but other reviewers seem to feel the same.
Thanks to Zando & NetGalley for the ARC.
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