(Celadon, 269 pages)
As possibly the only person on the planet who hasn’t read Gone Girl, I am unqualified to compare Gillian Flynn’s 2014 novel to any other book, but I know enough about it to know what it means when other people do this. The comparison promises multiple twists that will knock you out of your chair, your perception of the events and characters totally skewed.
Best Offer Wins is the latest novel to pulsate with the Gone Girl vibe, earning Marisa Kashino the kind of buzz that rarely accompanies a first-time author. It has an entirely relatable premise: a young woman is shut out of the housing market because of too many buyers (and hedge funds) flush with cash and becomes caught up in her quest to be the winning bidder on a suburban D.C. house she wants to raise a family in.
Margo Miyake and her husband, Ian, don’t have children yet, but they’re trying. They’re living in an apartment “so small you can vacuum almost all of it from a single outlet,” having sold their modest starter home planning to upgrade with the profits. But then they find out that the housing market has changed in terrible ways since they’d bought their first house.
Every house they want is getting dozens of offers, many well over the asking price and all cash. Margo and Ian are well off compared to most Americans — she’s in PR, he’s a government lawyer — and they are prepared to spend more than a million on their forever home. But even that’s not enough, and so when Margo gets an insider tip that a four-bedroom home in a desirable neighborhood in Bethesda will soon come on the market, she decides to pull out all the stops, sneakily befriending one of the homeowners and snagging an invitation to dinner at the house.
Friends, the cringe doesn’t come in on little cat feet; it bursts in like a golden retriever left too long outside in the cold.
But the cringe turns into something darker as Margo, the narrator throughout, becomes more and more obsessed with the house. She’s mentally moving in, imagining her new, perfect life within its walls so vividly that she even orders new house numbers to replace the current ones that she doesn’t like. When the homeowners, a gay couple with an adorable adopted daughter, grow suspicious and Margo realizes that her Plan A isn’t going to work, she recalculates and embarks on another scheme, and then another, even as her obsession begins to negatively impact her work and her marriage. It’s not at all clear whether, if she somehow places a winning bid when the house formally comes on the market, she and her husband will still have the income to qualify for a mortgage, or even if they will still be together at all.
As Margo plunges deeper into her quest, we learn, in bits and drabs, why this particular house matters so much to her, and what the life she imagines living there represents. We learn that she had a deeply insecure childhood, that her parents once lost a house to foreclosure, that she once lost a dog to which she was deeply attached. She may or may not be mentally unstable; she may or may not be justified in the increasingly bizarre ways in which she tries to obtain the house.
We’re also not so sure about her husband, Ian, who at first seems devoted to Margo and undeserving of the derision she casts on him. Later events call his devotion into question, but that’s par for the course; it’s unclear if anyone in this story is who they initially seem to be, except for a neighbor’s dog, Fritter, with whom Margo is infatuated.
Margo moves in and out of our sympathy, as she botches important work assignments, comes to the brink of losing her job and takes advantage of good-hearted friends who help when she asks. Yet she is also surrounded by people who have what she wants — to include great homes and children. At times she is even envious of her husband, who had a stable upbringing: “He grew up with a dad who coached his little league teams and a mom who sent him to school with homemade cupcakes on his birthdays. Two loving parents who call us at least once a week to check in,” Margo tells us. “But my childhood, erratic as it was, gave me something even more valuable, something I have come to accept that Ian will never have: hunger.”
There is a dark humor that underpins the narrative, and the story moves swiftly; except for the backstory, the events happen within a couple of weeks. The answers to the two questions that power the book — will Margo get the house, and if so, at what cost? — are impossible to to guess, right up to the final pages of the book, making Best Offer Wins the proverbial page-turner.
But making it to the end of a book doesn’t necessarily mean the reader will like it once they get there, and the ending raises other questions. Is a book enjoyable just because it is engrossing, because it distracts us so effectively from the real world? Sometimes that seems to be the case. But what if we rush to the end of a book, caught in its current like a fast-moving river, and once there, the ending turns out to be deeply unsettling? Is the book still enjoyable then? Those are the unexpected questions that Best Offer Wins presents, ones that I’m still mulling. B+ —Jennifer Graham
Featured Photo: Best Offer Wins, by Marisa Kashino
