Review: The Most

Jessica Anthony’s recent novella, The Most fuels my current infatuation with delightful short books. (Hello progress on my Goodreads Challenge!) Set in an apartment complex in Delaware during the 1950s, it’s easy to dismiss this as a domestic drama that glorifies times past where everyone is white, good-looking, and middle class. This story is so much darker than that, but not on the grand scale that we see in Mad Men. For starters, the family in The Most is working with a much more modest budget. The husband, Virgil, works in insurance and is barely earning anything because he precipitously uprooted his wife, Kathleen, and their two sons from their house in Rhode Island to Delaware.

The story begins with Kathleen waking up feeling too queasy for church. While some of it is morning sickness, some of it is the unease of things she doesn’t understand about her husband’s motives for the move as well as her disappointment in how long they have stayed at The Acropolis Hill Apartments. It was supposed to be for a few months, but they’re coming up on almost a year now.

When her husband and children go to church, Kathleen fields a couple of strange phone calls and decides to finally use the pool that originally attracted them to the apartment complex and that nobody has used. Things get a bit more interesting when her husband comes home and Kathleen refuses to get out of the pool.

Through a graceful dance between memories Kathleen has of becoming a tennis champion, and the handsome trainer she had before she met Virgil who taught her The Most, and the series of lies and disappointments that have led to this time in her life, it becomes clear that Virgil has been deceptive, but there’s more to Kathleen than he has ever noticed before.

I’m stunned that so much compassion and detail for their surprisingly complex lives fit into so few pages so elegantly, but that seems to be Jessica Anthony’s talent.

This review is based on the paperback edition of The Most, July 2024

144 pages

Published by Little Brown & Company