Constant Reader October 2024 (Adult) Prom Mom By Laura Lippman

The COVID Lockdown Thriller You Didn’t Know You Needed

It’s both appalling and completely understandable that it took until this year for one of Laura Lippman’s brilliant mystery novels Lady of The Lake to get a TV adaptation. Appalling because Lippman has been one of the best selling novelists of the last quarter of a century and understandable when you learn that until fairly recently she was married to David Simon, arguably the greatest single showrunner in TV history. Anyone who has followed Simon’s work (and Lippman makes reference to it in quite a few of her novels) knows that the lion’s share of his TV shows, from Homicide, The Wire and We Own This City have been set in Baltimore. And the majority of Lippman’s work, Lady of the Lake among them, is set in Charm City as well. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that Simon’s employment with HBO was terminated not long after Lady of the Lake debuted on Apple: I can just imagine how many executives have rejected Lippman’s work because they don’t want to a Baltimore set mystery.

Lippman is, like many mystery writers, an author of both her own mystery series and stand-alone novels. The former involve Tess Monaghan, a former reporter with a defunct Baltimore newspaper who becomes a private investigator and begins to investigates crimes that involve the often corrupt nature of her home city. To date I’ve read three and they are compact, literate and involve the corrupt nature of Baltimore and Monaghan’s complicated family, which involves a mixture of Irish, Judaism and feminism.

Her standalone novels are closer to noir and have a frequently historical tone: Life Sentences involves a nonfiction writer investigating a mystery that involves the murder of a baby going back decades and finds a deeper story linking to both race and her own family history. Sunburn tells the story of two strangers who begin a one night stand and their affair ends up relating to a series of deaths. Dream Girl her most recent novel, involves an aged author who is undergoing memory loss and doesn’t know if the nurse he’s trapped with might be a killer. All of these novels are both short and incredible reads at the same time.

The novel that’s fascinating me is one she wrote in 2022 Prom Mom. The novel is about Amber Glass who the title refers to. As you might expect she went to her prom pregnant, gave birth in the hotel afterwards and her baby was found dead. Amber denied her responsibility but no one believed her she was sentenced to a juvie facility and her future was compromised. She moved out of Baltimore and has spent her entire adult life in New Orleans.

When her stepfather dies she returns to Baltimore to settle his estate and claim her inheritance. She’s in real estate and when she drives she sees space for a commercial gallery and she decides, almost impulsively to rent it. When she tries to convince one of her few friends that this is a sign she tells her bluntly: “You can’t go home again, Amber…I’m surprised you want too.”

In a sense Amber knows why she’s doing it within a few minutes the moment she decides to google Joe Simpson the man who got her pregnant and who was blamed for it.

The novel follows Amber, Joe and his wife Meredith. It starts in the winter of 2019, starts with the early onset of the pandemic and deals with the 2020 election and the aftermath, though it is not the direct subject of the novel. I should mention that none of the major characters develop symptoms, nor do they even know anyone who dies from the disease. Indeed, what is the most bizarre thing about the novel is that not only Amber and Meredith end up enjoying COVID far more than they have any right and in a way seem resentful when the vaccines come.

The novel is essentially about Joe and the three women who have certain levels of obsession with him. What’s the most remarkable thing about Prom Mom is that even before the action has truly begun the reader really wonders why any of these women find anything remarkable or even interesting about Joe, who comes across every time the perspective comes to him as the definition of the weakest and most unremarkable person imaginable. The irony is that Amber’s potential was snuffed out because of what happened to her and Joe truly believes the same thing happened to him when it fact he never seems like the kind of man who had any ability for anything other than to be unremarkable but truly believes he was exceptional.

Joe has spent his entire life, from his teenage years on, always chasing something better. He was failing French in high school when Amber agreed to tutor him. At the time his girlfriend Kaitlyn broke up with him and Amber, who came from the wrong side of the tracks, had a crush on him. The two began a relationship which Amber believed was out of mutual desire but was more likely because Joe just wanted to have sex. Amber wanted to go to the prom and Joe didn’t want to go but he agreed to take her. He actually left her during the prom to hook up with Kaitlyn.

Amber didn’t know she was pregnant at the time, something neither the press nor the police believed. As we learn this happened because her own mother got pregnant with her as a teenager by a much older man who promptly left her and her mother not only never loved her but barely paid attention to her. When she got married to Amber’s stepfather who may have been the only man who cared for her, she refused to let him take his name and didn’t believe her daughter as a matter of course. Amber no doubt left Baltimore as much to get away from her mother as the tabloid headlines.

Joe’s mother, by contrast, worshipped and never considered Amber good enough for her. As we see in a flashback and other scenes in the present, Mrs. Simpson never thought any woman her oldest son dated was good enough for him or indeed any of the women her other children ended up marrying. From what we see of her Mrs. Simpson is a piece of work, always nagging at Joe and his wife, always looking down on anybody who gets in the way of her family’s plans. Even during the height of the virus she insists that this not stand in the way of the Christmas party and she waffles on the idea of it even being outside.

Joe is devoted to Meredith and doesn’t want to do anything to hurt her. He’s basically done everything she’s wanted to do he never wanted to have children, when he met her in Houston and she wanted to go back to John Hopkins he followed her even though he never wanted to go back to Baltimore, he went to work for his uncle who he doesn’t like but who very well may be the only person who was willing to hire him. Joe has no capability to recognize the changing time and may only be decent at his job in commercial real estate. In an effort to prove himself and impress his uncle he decides to buy a shopping mall which he intends to flip when it becomes a success. Critically he makes the purchase in February of 2020.

During this same period Joe has begun having an affair with a real estate agent named Jordan Altman. He’s made it clear that this is a temporary thing and that he has no intention of leaving Meredith for her. Jordan, however, has apparently decided that she is not going to take no for an answer — if Joe was willing to give it, which he keeps refusing to do because he’s such a nice guy. He can’t even bring himself to break up with her directly and tells her he and Meredith are trying to have a baby together which he thinks will satisfy her. It doesn’t. She ends up going to Meredith’s office to speak with her and comes very close to blowing the whole secret.

We never see the novel from Jordan’s perspective so we never know why she thinks she deserves to have Joe or why she starts taking actions to not only blow up his life but destroy him. The closest we get comes when she goes to see Meredith, ostensibly for a consultation. “I want to be the best at everything,” she tells Meredith. “Because I like to win.” She can’t even come up with a reason why; she clearly considers Joe a prize and refuses to acknowledge even as she does everything to destroy so much of the order of things, why she’s doing this.

Meredith would seem to be the victim here but on closer inspection, she may be the biggest monster in the novel. She doesn’t like Joe’s family, she has a book club but she doesn’t like the people there, she considers herself a good person because she does plastic surgery on the downtrodden but that’s just a way she sees herself. She suffered breast cancer that nearly killed her at nineteen and that’s when she and Joe found each other. She is as devoted to Joe as he is to her…but she doesn’t like anyone else.

Meredith is a model of the good liberal person but the more we see her the more we see that she’s the definition of not only a narcissist but a racist and a borderline sexist as well. When her friends tell her late in the pandemic that they’re getting divorced because of the lockdown she makes it clear that she considers divorce a moral weakness and on the woman’s part more than the man’s. She bought a big house that is too large for her but she has no desire to move into something smaller. At one point in the novel she truly believes she has COVID and uses that to seclude herself. However, much later in the novel when she discusses it with her mother, her mother tells her that she wants to believe you had it: “You hate being sick but you hate being ordinary more.”

Meredith’s parents, we learn early in the novel, are both alcoholics — liver specialists ironically — and Meredith’s experience being raised by them contributed to her never wanting to have children. In the latter half of the novel Meredith’s grandmother tells her that her parents loved each other once but that her being born destroyed their marriage. It says much about Meredith that she believes that raising a child may have destroyed them, rather than the very real possibility raising her was the problem; in the final pages we get a very clear picture as to just why Meredith is who she was and why she and Joe may be perfectly matched.

Amber decides to friend Joe on Facebook and Joe ends up seeing her later to buy Christmas gift for Jordan because he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings before Christmas. They end up getting closer and then the lockdown happens. Joe is the kind of person who has high energy and can’t stand being cooped up. He needs to get out and be with people. He goes to see Amber in an open place and…well, I think you can guess what happens next.

Amber, it’s worth noting, comes to her senses about what this is quicker than Joe does, because after awhile Joe’s life keeps interfering. It’s telling that what Joe isn’t worried about Meredith discovering is his affair with Amber or even Jordan but the financial difficulties he’s in and the multiple frauds he kept committing in order to keep his head above water. Joe keeps telling himself he’s such a nice guy that he doesn’t want to tell Meredith in order to upset her. And this is the time Jordan decides that she wants Joe back.

It’s telling that as the novel progresses Joe is both unable to make a decision about what to do and keeps telling himself he’s a good person. Joe is the kind of guy who gets mixed up in James Cain’s novels but unlike so many of those characters Joe can’t even be bothered to make the hard choices and wants Amber to do it for him. Even then his solution is so weak and piecemeal — he doesn’t want to really hurt anybody.

This novel is both incredibly thrilling and quietly satiric, particularly in the way it describes both Joe and Meredith. Joe is the kind of guy who refuses to make up his mind about anything and even when the 2020 election comes around just can’t decide who he wants to vote for. (The joke of course is he’s voting in Maryland, which means it won’t make a difference if he were to vote for Trump.) Amber can never bring herself to ask if he voted for Trump, but when they meet after January 6th and he says: “You have to understand people are angry”, it unnerves her in a way nothing else has. There’s also the fact that Meredith and Amber are kind of unwilling to leave the bubble they’ve been in during COVID for different reasons and while have moments of guilt when they think so — people are dying after all and they’ve just been inconvenienced — they seem unbothered by what’s actually happening around them. The sad part everything that happened — including the inevitable death, though I won’t say who dies — would never have happened except under these circumstances.

By the end of Prom Mom we learn the truth about what happened the night at the prom and who Joe really was all this time. And despite what you learn about what happened and to who Amber still emerged with the one with the clearest moral compass not only about who she was but what she spent her life avoiding. And there is, in a real sense, the kind of happy ending you rarely get in a noir as everybody gets exactly what they deserve.

I haven’t seen Lady in the Lake yet and I may not unless it starts getting award considerations later on. But I hope that it leads to adaptations of other works by Lippman for television. Considering that Will Trent just got his own TV series, I’d say its high time for Tess Monaghan. And so many of Lippman’s other novels lend themselves to the limited series treatment, including Prom Mom. Having just seen The Penguin I think I could easily see Kristin Miloti playing Amber Glass. She certainly has that killer instinct.