The Rachel Incident, by Caroline O’Donoghue, was basically a one-sitting read for me. The plot’s twisty and emotional, full of realistic early-twenties intensity, with a much-older professor, who’s really chasing that early-twenties vibe.

For me, characters are the driving force of most fiction. When I enjoy a novel, I’m invested in their choices and in what happens next. I don’t need to like all the characters, though, and The Rachel Incident is full of characters veering into unlikeable territory, all these people doing unpleasant or unlikable things for terribly realistic reasons. I loved the intensity, even as part of my brain screamed geez, no, what are you doing? How could this possibly end up well? at Rachel, at James and, actually, all of the characters.

Rachel and her bookstore coworker James fall into an intense college-age friendship, almost immediately becoming roommates and besties, spending every minute together.  Rachel has a crush on her married professor, and sets up a reading at the bookstore for his obscure new book. No, actually, I didn’t buy that she wanted to have sex with him, more that she wanted to be him — literary, successful, adored. Their romance doesn’t take off, but the night of the reading takes an unexpected turn for Rachel, setting the rest of the story in motion and leading to a series of secrets, compromises, and revelations over years in her life.  It’s wild, but the intensity is also realistic, in the way that attending or skipping one party in our twenties can change a life’s course for years to come.

The Rachel Incident is mostly character-driven, with complicated, believable relationships, but it also contains clever, realistic observations on class and on literary culture.  There is an entire load of angst, secrets, and manipulation to get there, but at one point Rachel has a lit internship and she wants both to get the creative success she sees around her, and also, if she’s so on track for that, to finally earn some freaking money.

Look, the angst and the drama is all real, and I loved it, but there’s a scene at the end in which Rachel describes her writing career as an underpaid good time, where occasionally a company will send her a promo scarf. I have never heard low-level creative life summed up so well. Writing, in fiction, is almost always about a character telling their deepest darkest truths and turning that into money and acclaim. Or it goes the absolute other way, and the artist refuses all money to stay true to their artistic vision. It was amazing to read about a character who was using her lit background, thinking about books and pop culture, enjoying the fringe benefits, and getting small checks from it.

It was also a solid resolution to the story, bringing out characters through to a stage of low drama and low intensity, long after the Rachel incident.