When Life Gives You Lemons, Get an Online Sex Account
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.
