Ron Charles's Reviews > Friends and Strangers

“Babysitter,” “nanny,” “caregiver,” “au pair” — we have many names for the people we welcome into our homes to tend what is most precious to us. As parents know, it’s a relationship fraught with anxiety, caught up in our need to work and our hunger for freedom. In a world without butlers and liverymen and cooks, the babysitter is the only domestic employee most of us will ever hire. How should we regard this person we’re so proud to pay a tad more than minimum wage, this almost-relative who might see our child walk for the first time?

Kiley Reid explored that knotty relationship at the start of this year in her witty debut novel, “Such a Fun Age.” The story about a white woman determined to prove how much she appreciates her black babysitter cuts into the soft underbelly of liberal vanity.

J. Courtney Sullivan approaches that terrain from a different angle in her new novel, “Friends and Strangers.” Race plays a smaller part in her story, but Sullivan is just as interested in the asymmetrical relationship between parents and caregivers. She focuses particularly on the culture of privilege that works so effectively to maintain class distinctions while erasing any acknowledgment of them.

This is a more constrained story than Sullivan’s 2017 masterpiece, Saints for All Occasions,” which . . .

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