Small Pond: A Novel

In a bohemian enclave of a well-known city, where rents are rising and dreams are quietly downsizing, Carolina still holds court in her rent-controlled apartment, home for nearly two decades to Noble Failure, a beloved, chaotic monthly performance night where artists come to perform, commiserate, fall in love, and insist their big break is right around the corner.

It goes without saying that they’re all insufferable. They are also, mostly, excellent company. There’s Sophie, a young TV director hustling her way up the ladder; Owen, her renaissance-man boyfriend, forever pursuing his next genius project but currently voicing a daisy on a children’s television show; and Will, once a wunderkind comedy writer, now privately wrestling with the gap between who he was going to be and who he’s become.

They aren’t unhappy, exactly. Their lives are more or less where they imagined they’d be when they were young, starry-eyed, and falling into bed together. So why does it not feel . . . complete? When Sophie starts texting Will—innocent jokes, small asides—she tells herself it means nothing. But what began as nothing is feeling dangerously close to something. Then the one who escaped their small city for the spotlight of L.A. announces she’s returning for Noble Failure’s anniversary show—and suddenly everyone is reconsidering where they’ve landed. The future they’ve been putting off is no longer theoretical.

Small Pond is a whip-smart, comic reckoning with love, friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves about success. Warm, sharply observed, and alive to the absurdity of trying to make a life and a living out of your dreams, it’s a love story in the largest sense: to creative ambition, to the people we choose, and to the strangely sustaining act of trying, and failing, again and again, in public.