Five Self-Obsessed Danes Make For A Surprisingly Fun And Sexy Summer Read
Waist Deep, the debut novel and international bestseller by Danish writer Linea Maja Ernst, reads like it’s inspired equally by television sitcoms and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The premise of Waist Deep fits both genres, with an ensemble cast in a cinematic location: Five old friends from university, plus two partners, plus two children, all reunite at a summer house on a remote lake in Denmark for a week. The one where the gang gets back together!
Once everyone is there, the hosts, Karen and Esben, announce their plan to get married at the end of the week, surrounded by their friends. The one with the surprise wedding! But like any friend group, there are subterranean tensions and histories, old crushes that revive in new locations. You can already picture the tagline rife with suspense: Will their relationships survive the week?
Like a play, or even a title sequence, Waist Deep begins with a cast of characters, mapping out relationships and personalities before the narrative gets going. There are the five old friends from university:
-Sylvia, “Pathological dreamer. Dating Charlie and confused,”
-Quince, “Charmer. A bachelor in a sea of couples,”
-Gry, “Goddess of care. Married to Adam, mother of Vera and Sejr,”
-Esben, “Writer, mild-mannered and a little reserved. Engaged to Karen,” and
-Karen, “Tall, commanding, objectively beautiful. A born queen.”
Then there are the two plus ones, Charlie (“An absolute dreamboat of a girlfriend. Looks like a fairytale prince”) and Adam (“Bureaucrat, clean-cut. Father of Vera and Sejr. Not unprincely himself”), and Vera and Sejr, “the kids,” who feature in the story about as much as the furniture, thankfully. A page like this invites the reader to cast themselves in the story that follows, to self-type like a sitcom viewer: Are you a Rachel or a Monica or a Phoebe? A Gry or a Karen or a Sylvia?
But to its credit, the characters of Waist Deep are not so flat as in Friends, and this is not a television show but rather a novel. And as a novel, able to quickly flit between character perspectives and render interiority and consciousness on the page, Waist Deep leaves the shallowness of types behind: these characters are peculiar and particular, rife with contradiction. Ernst’s writing, and Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg’s wonderful translation, is particularly lithe and funny, full of sensual (and pointed) detail. The adults are constantly showing off, one-upping each other, as the vacation becomes a performance of their own personal happiness. They read modernist novels and prepare intricate dishes, like fried elderflower or shakshuka cooked over an outdoor fire, and they have sex, often loudly, hearing each other through the thin walls. Waist Deep‘s entire effect is more satirical comedy of manners than minimalist contemporary novel. Ernst has a critique to make, and she has a lot of fun bringing it forth in these characters.
Waist Deep proceeds day by day, and like any group vacation, each new day brings new configurations of people and group dynamics. Ernst moves deftly between the adults’ perspectives, following conversations and internal judgements that I can only describe as deeply millennial. Sourdough recipes are mentioned, memes are quoted, arguments for polyamory are advanced at the dinner table, someone is corrected for saying goat cheese instead of chèvre. The characters share a deep desire to be seen as cool and cosmopolitan, along with a slight shame about the ways they have settled down and accepted a conventional life. Adam and Gry are parents, styling themselves as the real adults in the room but secretly worried their friends see them as squares, mildly annoyed that no one ever offers to babysit. Karen and Esben are sheepish about their summer wedding, about finally getting married, because it’s just so predictable. Sylvia is sick of the comfortable routine of her committed relationship with Charlie and instead fantasizes over her one-time college crush: Esben. Charlie, for her part, wants to get married and settle down, to take care of Sylvia and have some kids, buy a house. She is unconventional by virtue of how much she yearns for conventionality. Quince, a trans man, is a Puck-like figure, mischievous and fun, whose carefree and nonmonogamous lifestyle sounds stressful to the straight couples. For each character, the contents of other people’s lives and happiness seem totally incomprehensible.
Ernst’s characters, with their snide judgments and misunderstandings, their particularities and perspectives, are what make Waist Deep so fun to read. In the age of the too-close millennial novel of ideas, it’s a treat to get into more than one person’s head, to move along when someone becomes too annoying. Take Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, another international bestseller that ironizes the striving of the millennial bourgeoisie and their cosmopolitan lives as consumers. The plot of Perfection is relayed in third person, but the novel confines itself to describing the (rather boring) life of Berlin expat couple Tom and Anna and their immaculately furnished apartment. The couple starts to feel unreal, which is the point, busy as they are posting and posturing their way through life. There’s something airless about Perfection, and while I found it sharp and funny, I couldn’t wait to exit the small orbit of its narrative perspective when I was done. Instead of drilling down into one couple and letting the reader do the critical thinking, Waist Deep opens the door wide to a bizarre, tense, hilarious dinner party full of people who are ready to criticize each other, sometimes openly and sometimes behind closed doors. Not for nothing does Ernst have Sylvia reading Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, perhaps the best novel about the peculiarity of vacationing with other people, the constant shifting of alliances around the dinner table.
Like any group or collective, an unevenness emerges in Waist Deep, at least in narration. We hear very little from Esben, the sensitive and tortured writer, outside of Sylvia’s romanticized account of him, and Karen, the cold but benevolent alpha female, seems underdeveloped, less believable than the others. Sylvia’s perspective dominates the novel, and at times, her literal main-character syndrome is grating. She is self-obsessed, dramatic, and indecisive, at one point literally sitting in a fig tree and thinking herself into Plath’s famous, much-Tumblr-ified passage from The Bell Jar. Though to her credit, she does remember what so few reposters do: that Plath’s heroine pictures herself starving in the tree, unable to decide on a fig, watching them ripen and drop away.
But it’s Sylvia’s critique of her highly educated and anxiety-ridden friends that makes the novel so spiky, so enjoyable. Ernst said in an interview with British Vogue that the seed of Waist Deep emerged from “frustration—or wonder, should I say—about everyone falling into place, settling and appearing quite serene about that. And I had this cognitive dissonance, like, weren’t we radicals five minutes ago?” Ernst’s question is Sylvia’s, too: She looks around her group of friends and asks, what happened to us? Didn’t all the critical theory we read and debated in college mean anything?
The best moments of Waist Deep are when radical postures are challenged, revealed as all surface and no depth, just something nice to say at a dinner party. Early on, Quince clocks that Sylvia “calls herself a Communist even though she has not read a single word of Marx.” Gry, who studies water and Danish mythology, describes a local plant that reproduces asexually as “queer,” and the actual queer people at the table smile politely, kicking each other’s feet under the table. “Only heterosexual academics would ever call a plant queer,” Sylvia thinks, “because to them everything that’s slightly odd, slightly off-kilter is totally gay and exciting.” Later, when chopping vegetables for dinner, she thinks about how Karen and Gry get to have it all as progressive straight women:
“They get to be right, to win on both courts, unconventional but conventional, tolerant but perfectly aligned with the statistics. They keep up with contemporary experimental literature while taking care of their 1.5 children, adding their names to the waiting lists of their own well-managed housing cooperatives, the image of happiness in their amply lit open kitchens, steaming bao buns. The millennial bourgeoise. Has history ever produced something so perverse?”
The detail of bao buns made me laugh out loud. But this moment gets even funnier when we return to Gry and Karen’s perspective just a page later and learn that Sylvia, caught up in her own brilliance having these very thoughts, has wandered away from her fennel bulb and left all the work for the other women to finish. Throughout Waist Deep, Ernst takes Sylvia down a peg, while also co-signing some of her earnestness, her desire to imagine a new kind of life.
All told, Waist Deep is a fun, surprising, sexy novel about a group of people I would actively avoid in real life. But for all the shortcomings of the characters, realistic as they might be, for all the fun of Ernst’s satire, there’s something deeply winsome and affable at the heart of the novel. The questions that Waist Deep asks of adult friendship are sincere: What kind of lives do we want to live? How do we understand our friends’ happiness, especially when it is so different from what makes us happy? Can we desire different worlds but reside together in this one?
