MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES, by Rufi Thorpe
An earnest synopsis of “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” Rufi Thorpe’s fourth novel, might give you the impression that it is overstuffed and, as a consequence, misshapen. Wrestling? OnlyFans? A young mother? Custody battles? Substance abuse? A touch of metafictional playfulness? Jokes about all of these things? But it is overstuffed only in the way a pillowcase is overstuffed on Christmas morning, if you’re lucky. You don’t see lumps; you see only gifts, and Thorpe is a generous, if unseasonal, Santa.
Margo has dropped out of college because her English professor has impregnated her before he dumps her, and she has decided to keep the baby, without thinking very much about the consequences — consequences that are made more brutal by the father’s refusal to acknowledge the child beyond a smallish lump sum and an NDA.
She tries to make motherhood work within her current domestic arrangements — college roommates, a waitressing job — but it inevitably ends in tears. The roommates don’t want to study for exams with a screaming baby next door, so they move out, leaving Margo a big hole in the rent payments. She has no money for child care and loses her job. Thorpe is very good on delivering the suffocating beat-by-beat impossibility of Margo’s situation: the panic, the squalor, the despair, the puke.
She is rescued by the arrival of her historically absent father, a former pro wrestler whose career has left him with excruciating pain and an addiction to opioids. He turns out to be a loving, competent grandfather whose only flaw is his propensity to OD in the bathroom. On the plus side, Jinx (so-called because his first pro wrestling opponent dropped dead in the ring before the contest) is broadly supportive of Margo’s OnlyFans account, which provides the financial lifeline she needs.
So there’s the earnest synopsis. But all this can work only if the writer has both control of the material and a loving eye, and the warmth of Thorpe’s tone, together with the thoroughness of her imagination and the artfulness of her pacing, means that skepticism is kept at bay. She sells us on both the characters and the plot, and her refusal to moralize, her ability to get behind her characters despite their mess and fecklessness — if Thorpe gives up her day job, she’d make a great counselor — means that there are no tonal lurches.
Keeping the ship steady is one of the hardest things to do in an accessible work of comic fiction; often, a less skilled writer will decide too late that they want depth and meaning, and resort to chucking something difficult into the mix. But here it feels as if Thorpe embedded the book’s knottier subjects — the inappropriate relationship with the professor, the sex work, the drugs — in her initial planning, and found a way to accommodate them without jarring the reader into resistance.
The playfulness of the narrative voice works wonders, too. The father of Margo’s baby was teaching her and her classmates about novelistic point of view before life intervened, and Margo switches constantly between third and first person, with winning explanatory interjections: “It’s true that writing in third person helps me. It’s much easier to have sympathy for the Margo who existed back then rather than try to explain how and why I did all the things that I did.”
In other words, she occasionally denies herself access to her own head because it’s easier that way — perhaps, Thorpe seems to be implying, it would be easier for everyone, both real and fictional, to have that access denied on occasion. One of the things that interest the author is class: Well-meaning moneyed people (the least sympathetic people in the book, incidentally) keep making helpful suggestions for Margo’s betterment — college! viticulture! But when you are 20 and you have a baby and no money, how many options are available to you?
On the Instagram account Dust-to-Digital, artists from all over the world are shown making music in the most unlikely places, sometimes with the most unlikely musical instruments, and you end up thinking about the inevitability of art, how people have to make it somehow. Margo’s OnlyFans posts weirdly turn into a kind of art, too — something to be proud of, something that can absorb just a little of her frustrated creativity and natural intelligence.
As she and a couple of colleagues art-design their offerings, write scripts for them, turn them into something cool, one is reminded of the great Kevin Wilson, who has written more than one novel about odd or reluctant artists’ making the best of unpromising environments. Thorpe ends this enormously entertaining and lovable book by offering her characters a way out. We want it for them, and they deserve it.
MARGO’S GOT MONEY TROUBLES | By Rufi Thorpe | William Morrow | 304 pp. | $28
