A review of The Proper Care & Maintenance of Friendship by Lisa Verge Higgins

There are not many books that openly discuss the subject matter of friendship. In fact, some of the finest portrayals of friendship are oblique, like Sam and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Friendship is often seen as the weaker or more superficial of the loves, and the majority of the books focus on romantic love, with most of the others centred on familial affection.

The Proper Care & Maintenance of Friendship starts strongly with an interesting premise: a group of four friends has been split by time and lifestyle; then one (Rachel) dies, suddenly. Yet, from the grave, she sends letters to each friend, challenging them to do something.

Kate, who is a stay at home Mum, must go sky-diving! Sarah, an international aid worker, must focus on herself for once and follow-up an old love interest. The biggest shock though, is for Jo, a fast-living advertising executive. She is set a challenge that will transform her life, and her heart.

This is a well-constructed book, which maintains a steady pace. It is based more on American culture, so lacks some of the dry (don’t take yourself too seriously) characteristics of an Australian writer. However, it manages to avoid too much superficiality, and too much saccharine.

I liked that the author focused on an aspect of friendship that is unique amongst the other loves: the ability of friends to bring out the best in each other. Romantic love can be too intense and introspective for that. Familial affection has so many competing demands. Often it is our friends who can step back and see us more clearly than we can see ourselves, and suggest a direction that can help to transform us.

In the Bible we see this exemplified in the friendship of Jonathan and David. When Jonathan affirms a vision of David becoming God’s chosen king of Israel, he does so at the cost of his own dream (being the king’s son, and heir to the throne). Ultimately, his support of that vision drives a wedge between Jonathan and his father Saul, and ends up in David’s exile and the separation of the friends.

Such is the cost of this aspect of friendship.

In the same way Kate, Sarah and Jo must take great risks to fulfil the challenges of their dead friend Rachel. They end up discovering things about themselves that Rachel could see, but they were blind to. Kate finds a way to reinvigorate her marriage, Sarah discovers that she had been clinging to a false hope that had prevented her from moving on, and Jo finds that career and money and superficial relationships are not solid bases for a meaningful life.

Although much of the credit is given to a sense of a “higher power” working through Rachel; it is a very vague sense of God. Interestingly, the character with the most Christian background and language, Sarah, makes the worst choices morally, but does go on to regret and repent. She resists the temptation to blame others: “Sarah had made the decision all on her own. In the months past she had made peace with God, and her own conscience.”

It is rare in popular culture to see an example of moving beyond a sense of wrong, to an admission of wrong, let alone an open recognition of the need to make peace with God.

Amidst the variations of ideas of spirituality, there are some clear and well-expressed messages about consumption. For example, aid worker Sarah challenges Kate about the perfect home-making lifestyle she is trying to sustain, drawing on the experience of Jo, the advertising executive:

Do you know what Jo once said to me? She confessed that her job in this world is to set up impossible ideals. To create an image so powerful that even good, striving people – people like you Kate – will do anything to attain that unreachable expectation.

There are also some powerful messages about the important role of parenting: the effort and energy that goes into a task that often feels unrewarded.

This novel is not an example of carefully crafted plot, intricately drawn characters, finely chosen metaphors… and the breathy love scenes draw on Higgins’ background in romance literature… However, this is an interesting book with some good ideas and subjects for sharing and reflection.