Books like An Experiment in Love
In An Experiment in Love, appetite is never merely appetite: Mantel makes food, study, friendship and self-denial register the same struggle over class, desire and who a young woman is permitted to become.
If you liked An Experiment in Love, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with An Experiment in Love, and we tell you exactly what.
Spark’s young women inhabit a genteel London hostel where dresses, bathwater and tiny portions circulate through an economy of scarcity. As in Mantel, material details become instruments of judgment: who eats, who borrows, who watches, who quietly profits. The comedy is immaculate and merciless, yet an undertow of danger keeps changing the meaning of every joke.
This brief, brilliantly engineered classic offers the same exhilarating sensation of a female world being observed without sentimentality. Spark can expose vanity or betrayal in half a sentence, and her elegant compression makes the novel feel far larger—and more devastating—than its size.
From an uneasy adulthood, Berie recalls the summer when she and her magnetic friend Sils worked at a shabby amusement park in upstate New York. Moore understands that an intense girlhood friendship can contain worship, competition, resentment and a private moral code—all at once.
What will especially speak to a Mantel reader is the retrospective intelligence: the older narrator knows more than the girl did, but cannot quite master or dismiss her. Moore’s wit flashes even when shame and loss press hardest. This slender novel has earned unusually fierce devotion because it captures how friendship can become the vanished country against which the rest of a life is measured.
Elena and Lila grow up measuring themselves against each other’s minds. Education promises escape, but every achievement alters the balance between them; admiration can become theft, rivalry can become intimacy, and social ascent carries its own humiliations. Ferrante shares Mantel’s unsparing understanding that intelligence does not free girls from class—it makes them more painfully conscious of its machinery.
The novel’s extraordinary psychological force comes from refusing to simplify either friend into victim, genius or enemy. The first volume of Ferrante’s internationally beloved Neapolitan quartet is already a complete and gripping novel, but its hold is cumulative: once Elena and Lila begin inventing themselves in each other’s gaze, it is very difficult not to follow them further.