Queering the Gilded Age in Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s Mutual Interest

Wolfgang-Smith’s 21st century sense of global economics infuses her early-20th century narrative with an intimate shared intelligence––a kind of mutual interest between storyteller and reader. 

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Brooklyn-based writer Olivia Wolfgang-Smith knows that in our era of unfettered capitalism, pre-modern gender ideology, and spiking queerphobia, the historical novel we need in 2025 is one that reminds us that the past was queer AF. Indeed, early 1900s New York City was a queer place, filled with surprising freedoms––and it was those freedoms that “made America great,” if we want to call it that. Mutual Interest (Bloomsbury, February 2025) is a tableau of ambitious, classy queers in Gilded Age New York making strategic alliances as they navigate their era of cut-throat capitalist growth.

The novel opens with a reference to the Year Without A Summer, a favorite historical tidbit to share with my high school seniors when we read Frankenstein together: it was the summer of 1816, following the eruption of Mount Tambora in modern day Indonesia, which led to a global incident of climate aberrations, including snow in July. Like our present climate disasters, its effects included famine, economic disruption, and a rise in cult-worship. It's the unseasonable summer that kept Mary Shelley and her literary buddies inside telling ghost stories during a trip to Switzerland. This reference, for me, was the first indication that Wolfgang-Smith’s omniscient narrator would illuminate the turn of the 20th century with a distinctly 21st century consciousness.

Like the spreading volcanic ash in 1816, the ripple effects of Mutual Interest's narrative quickly bring us to upstate New York in the late 19th century, where we meet Vivian and Oscar, both queer and from small towns that cannot contain their ambitions. When they reach New York City, we meet the third member of their fateful triangle: Squire, a wealthy, neurodivergent genius whose passion for scented candles lands him in competition with Oscar, a titan of the “Personal Care” industry. Wolfgang-Smith characterizes each of her three protagonists with originality and wit at every turn, and their intertwined destinies are satisfying to follow as they make arrangements of mutual interest that reflect the social constraints of their times as much as they illustrate each character’s individual ingenuity. 

And then there's Wolfgang-Smith’s delightful omniscient narrator, often making a Rod Serling-esque turn to the camera: "Our subject is change––inevitable, relentless. There is nothing to do but turn the page." She dares us keep reading on more than one occasion, and it's never an unwelcome reminder that I'm rapt, and that I want to do what she says. Like RuPaul on Drag Race, our narrator is queen, if campily so––and her biting yet loving hot takes on our characters keep us rooting for them despite their flaws. 

This is also an erudite book. Its lush sentences delighted me like an absorbing, psychological 19th century novel (think Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks), but with an encyclopedic flare; Wolfgang-Smith's research is illuminating, honed on details that feel deeply relevant to our present. Who knew essential oil supply chains could be gripping to read about?! This godlike narrator knew we'd be into it; her 21st century sense of global economics infuses the narrative with an intimate shared intelligence ––dare I say, a layer of mutual interest between storyteller and reader.

The novel has been compared to Trust (I'd compare it more to Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, if A Little Life were, like, fun); to me, the most salient thing Trust and Mutual Interest share (other than a little finance pun for a title) is a concern with fin-de-siecle capitalism. Perhaps Hernan Diaz's masterpiece––its Frankenstein-esque approach to exploring the human cost of excessive wealth, with shifting narrations to unsettle our moral expectations––saw such success in part because it hooks us with its promise to explain just how exactly we got the corrupt capitalist dystopia we currently live under. In fact, the story not only instructs in this history, it makes it memorable––you know, so we can remember, and remember to fight back. Mutual Interest, likewise, has much to teach us about capitalism––our capitalism––and it does so not with structural tricks, as Trust does, but with this very trustworthy, deific narrator whose friendly second-person addresses and turn-to-the-camera parenthetical asides belie a powerful mission to reveal the "change" at work.

On a recent trip to the movies, I noticed a spate of nostalgic films representing the World War II era. It’s a global horror show that still, maybe, generates public moral consensus. But I want less retreading of that familiar territory, and more explorations set in periods like the fin-de-siecle and early Gilded Age––a time of gender fluid social climbers, secret gay bars, factory-lined streets (like, meat-packing district literally packing meat!), a brand new subway system, and souls as tortured as our own trying to figure out how to spin a drab beginning into a glittering end. I recognize those people and their survival strategies; I’ve been craving more stories like Mutual Interest, whose birds-eye-view and vivid historical detail help me glimpse behind the wizard's curtain of the American Empire, all while getting to hang out in the underground worlds and minds that built the New York City we know today.

This book should be on your reading list for its delectable detailing of this period, but also for its representation of queer plots that are both matter-of-fact and extraordinary. Whereas a 19th century novel may have erased or coded these characters, Wolfgang-Smith gets to paint them in their full humanity. It’s one of the first times I could picture myself in that era; what more could you want from historical fic?

Mutual Interest taught me that in every so-called gilded age of American capitalism, intoxicating freedom of expression coexists with a very manmade determinism. In Vivian, Oscar, and Squire's time, as in our own, new and openly powerful gods reign––and will continue to do so, at least until the next unforeseen disaster changes the weather.