Olivia Wolfgang-Smith is an author whose debut novel “Glassworks” was long-listed for the Center for Fiction and Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novel prizes and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Apple. Her second novel, “Mutual Interest,” explores marriage and ambition, sexuality and secrecy, and what it costs to build an empire. Set in New York City at the turn of the century, it centers around Vivian Lesperance, determined to flee her upstate origins and find success in the city. When she meets Oscar Schmidt, a middle manager at a soap company, she seizes her chance, and the two pair up with Squire Clancey, heir of an old American fortune, to found Clancey & Schmidt, selling soap, perfume and candles. As Vivian tends to her own romances with women and Oscar to his with men, eventually including Squire, the trio form a unique bond. Vivian operates behind the image of both men, building Clancey & Schmidt into a personal care product empire, but when exposure threatens, all three realize how much they have to lose. “Mutual Interest” comes out Tuesday, and Wolfgang-Smith speaks at Harvard Book Store on Wednesday. We interviewed her Friday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
Was Clancey & Schmidt inspired by a real company?
To a very limited extent. It was inspired by a piece of historical trivia I took enormous liberties with. It comes from the origin of Procter & Gamble. William Procter and James Gamble were initially professional enemies. Procter was a candle maker and Gamble was a soap maker, and they were in competition because their industries had common raw materials, mostly animal fats. But they happened to marry into the same family, and they had this common relative who sort of banged their heads together and said you should be partners, not enemies. So I heard that story and I just thought it was such a fascinating piece of personal drama to be the origin story of what I thought of at the time as a pretty regular company – I don’t want to say boring, but soap and toothpaste. I turned up the heat on it, escalated it into a love story and invented this character of Vivian as a sort of romantic mastermind to orchestrate it all. So it’s different, but there is the historical enemies-to-partners seed there.
Did the writing require research to understand early 20th century personal care companies?
This was definitely a project. All historical fiction is this way to some extent, but in this case, reality really drove the story in different ways at different points. I started by learning about what personal care, hygiene, cosmetics companies were like in the 19th and early 20th centuries so I could find out how that would drive interpersonal conflict and character conflict. At a certain point, the writing process started to inform the research process; The narrative choices I was making indicated what I needed to be researching to fill the gaps.
What about that period interests you?
I love reading stories of historical queer community, fiction and nonfiction. I find it a very therapeutic form of research and work to do. There is something really powerful and important about telling and reading queer stories in the past, stories that combat the dangerous fiction that queer people and queer communities didn’t exist in the past. So yes, as a lover of queer fiction and historical fiction, I wrote about queer community in this period because I want to bring more titles to that combined shelf.
The book is narrated by an omniscient narrator with a bit of cheek who’s sort of in cahoots with the reader. What inspired that choice?
This book is inspired broadly by the social satire novels of manners from around the turn of the 20th century. A lot of them have this style convention of the very omniscient, intrusive narrator who breaks in and comments on the characters or decisions they’re making, which establishes an almost conspiratorial tone with the reader. Most specifically, I was inspired by Edith Wharton, especially because this book is taking place mostly in New York City at the turn of the century – I’m liberally stealing from her stylistically. I was blown away by how much fun it is to write that kind of narrative voice, and it ultimately became a driving force for the book.
Exploring queerness, female agency (or lack thereof), capitalism and more, what do you think still rings true?
My biggest hope for readers is that this book brings up questions around those themes. These are huge, tough questions to answer, especially in a novel, but one thing this book is really interested in is this universal, overwhelming inability to pick apart cause versus effect, progress versus damage, and what we have control and agency over versus what is happening to us and we can only react to. I hope the omniscient narrator helps readers think about that. When I was drafting the first version of this book, it was spring and summer 2020, so I was having lots of big feelings about these kinds of global and personal crises of agency, and I’m having them again in a different yet very related way. The beauty is I’m writing about characters who were having a lot of the same feelings a hundred years ago; I think that there’s a universality to that struggle and to grappling with those questions. I hope that readers feel some kind of sense of community with these characters as well as each other as they’re reading.
Olivia Wolfgang-Smith reads at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free.
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