If you’re half as Online as I am, you’re familiar with the AmITheAsshole subreddit. Normally shortened to “AITA”, the board is where people can post their conflicts and conundrums and ask others to judge whether they’re in the right. The responses are broadly sorted into three categories: “YTA” (you’re the asshole, you got this one wrong, you need to check yourself), “NTA” (not the asshole, you’re in the right, go forth and prosper), and – my favourite – “ESH” (everyone sucks here, no one is right, you all need to take a good, long hard look at yourselves). The latter category is one I’ve personally adopted as a microgenre, one I’m noticing more and more in my reading life. I call it the “Everyone Sucks Here” novel, where there is no hero and all of the primary characters deserve a big comeuppance. Here are ten books that fit that category.
Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Dangerous Liaisons is a novel where “love is not triumphant and virtue does not win out”. If this was an ATIA post, the result would be a resounding Everyone Sucks Here. It’s told through letters, mostly between the two central characters, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. These two frenemies are former lovers who get their kicks by ruining other people’s lives. Valmont is on a personal mission to seduce the virtuous, married Madame de Tourvel, just to say that he did. Merteuil thinks its a fool’s errand, and would rather he dedicate his energies to her scheme: seducing and ruining the young and innocent Cécile de Volanges, in the hopes of embarrassing her betrothed (a man she once loved who dumped her – it’s petty revenge). Read my full review of Dangerous Liaisons here.
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Every character in Gone Girl – from the married couple to the childhood friends to the greasy lawyer – exists in a murky grey area. No one is entirely likeable or unlikeable, trustworthy or untrustworthy, hero or villain. In other words, Everyone Sucks Here. Nick Dunne’s wife, Amy, disappears on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary. There’s a sign of a struggle in the living room, but no other real clues as to where she’s gone. Nick and Amy’s perspectives alternate throughout the novel. They describe their marriage in very different ways, each (obviously) more sympathetic to their own cause and critical of the other. Both narrators feel unsteady, unreliable, but it’s not exactly clear why… at first. Read my full review of Gone Girl here.
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
Eileen is narrated from the present(ish) day, but the protagonist is reflecting on events that took place the week of Christmas in 1964. Despite that choice for timing, I’ll warn you right now that Eileen is a holiday novel in the same sense that Die Hard is a Christmas movie. That week was the last that the titular main character spent in her hometown, a small Massachusetts village she calls X-ville. She is narrating for us what she calls her ‘disappearance’ at age 24. Read my full review of Eileen here.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff was once a ruffian street-kid, with a Cinderella-esque upbringing (once the dude who took him in died, the rest of the family started being really mean). Catherine was a saucy little minx, who flirtatiously tortured Heathcliff for years, but she ultimately decided to marry the snooty guy next door instead. It was a hella dramatic household – years of drunken rages and fights and marriage proposals and death, and now a narrator is getting the whole, gnarly story from a neighbouring house’s maid. It’s all great tea, but damn, Everyone Sucks Here. Read my full review of Wuthering Heights here.
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Normal People depicts four years of Connell and Marianne’s relationship, the ebbs and tides as they graduate high-school and attend Trinity College in Dublin. It’s basically the folie à deux of young love in novel form, but let me be clear: it’s not a romance novel. For most of the four year period, Connell and Marianne are barely friends, let alone lovers, and they never seem to actually like each other all that much. Read my full review of Normal People here.
Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
Elaine is an embittered artist returning to her hometown of Toronto for a retrospective of her work, to be shown at a local gallery. Cat’s Eye begins with her re-familiarising herself with the area, which causes her to think back to her childhood. Her family settled in the Canadian city when she was eight years old, after years of itinerant living while her father studied bugs (yeah, seriously). She became fast friends with two girls from her school, but their circle was broken wide open with the arrival of a new girl – Cordelia. Read my full review of Cat’s Eye here.
Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
At first glance, Fleishman Is In Trouble looks like your stock-standard New York divorce novel. A privileged couple – he’s a doctor, she’s a talent agent/manager – sniping at each other and using their kids like battering rams in the dissolution of their marriage. But by the end of the first chapter, you’ll realise that this is something different, something special. The story isn’t narrated by either of the central players, but by Libby, an old friend of Toby’s and a former journalist with her own blind-spots and biases. Her version of events isn’t unreliable, though, so much as… well, open to interpretation. Read my full review of Fleishman Is In Trouble here.
The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty
The Husband’s Secret is set in Sydney, where Cecilia is a (mostly) happily married mother-of-three – until she finds an envelope, written in her husband’s hand, and it says (ominous music): “For my wife, only to be opened in the event of my death”. But her husband is still very much alive, and he won’t tell her what’s inside. The story also follows Tess, a career-woman who returns to Sydney with her son after she finds out that her husband and her cousin are having an emotional affair. She enrolls her kid in the same school that Cecilia’s kids attend. And then there’s Rachel, the school secretary; she suspects that the P.E. teacher, Connor (who is, coincidentally, Tess’s ex-boyfriend), is the man responsible for the murder of her daughter thirty-odd years ago. Read my full review of The Husband’s Secret here.
Bunny by Mona Awad
Imagine a group of Popular Girls – a la Mean Girls or Heathers – who invite you to one of their parties, then promptly begin performing blood sacrifices and dark magic rituals. That’s basically the conceit of Mona Awad’s 2019 break-through novel, Bunny. Samantha Mackey is completing her MFA at a small New England liberal arts cottage, and she’s the outsider in her workshop class. The rest of the participants are Bunnies, a hyperfeminine clique of young women with wealth and pretty privilege in spades. Samantha’s only friend is Ava, a punk chain smoker who resents the university and the Bunnies and just about everything else. Read my full review of Bunny here.
Notes On A Scandal by Zoe Heller
Notes On A Scandal is narrated by Barbara, a veteran teacher at a London comprehensive school, and a lonely spinster in her spare time. She has – shall we say – trouble making friends. Her story begins with the arrival of Sheba Hart, a new and apparently-naive (though very privileged) art teacher. Barbara intuits that they are potential BFFs, though Sheba barely seems to realise she exists at first. Slowly, Barbara ingratiates herself into Sheba’s life – first with lunches off campus, then dinners at her home. Unbeknownst to Barbara, however, Sheba is doing some ingratiating of her own, “falling in love” with her 15-year-old student Steven Connolly. Read my full review of Notes On A Scandal here.
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