"Best Offer Wins"
By Marisa Kashino
Celadon Books
I guess it was only a matter of time before America’s housing shortage inspired a darkly funny, page-turning thriller like Marisa Kashino’s debut novel, “Best Offer Wins.”
For even when buying a house was a more easily attainable milestone of young adulthood, it was a fraught, draining, repetitive, euphoria-to-heartbreak emotional rollercoaster. Add scarcity to that mix, especially in an absurdly competitive market (like the outskirts of Washington, D.C.), and, well, you have a recipe for human desperation.
Which brings me to Margo Miyake, the journalist-turned-publicist who narrates “Best Offer Wins.” Before the novel begins, she and husband Ian had sold their starter home (a row house) with the aim of accumulating money for their “forever home,” where they plan to start a family.
To this end, the couple rents a small apartment. But they’ve been lived there for 18 months now. So far, they’ve been outbid for homes a soul-crushing ten times. Plus, Margo and Ian are struggling to get pregnant, though fertility tests have identified no reason for concern.
Margo cites Ian’s reluctance one morning to eat a cup of walnuts (supposedly a sperm count booster) as a “tipping point,” since she’d already given up caffeine, alcohol, and red meat: “an especially tall order when you hang out at restaurants and hotels for a living. Plus, he was getting laid every other day! But one morning, he refused to eat them. He said he just didn’t feel like it, that his stomach was unsettled. I felt the incinerator click on inside me – I get hot when I’m angry – and before I could think, I picked up the bowl and threw it as hard as I could at the fridge, walnuts and glass flying in all directions.”
This is an early hint as to how stuck and frustrated and angry Margo feels at the story’s outset. So when she hears about a not-yet-listed house in her “top-choice neighborhood,” she not only drives out to see it, dreaming of a pre-listing sale; she also hatches a plan to meet and befriend its co-owner at a local yoga class.
Thanks to Margo’s reflexive ability to concoct viable lies on her feet, the plan works. She and Ian are soon invited to married gay couple Jack and Curt’s house for dinner to talk about their adoption journey. (Not that Ian’s thrilled about Margo’s methods, but he’s eventually convinced to go.) That evening, one small detail completely unravels Margo’s plot, and the gathering ends in disaster.
Instead of giving up, licking her wounds, and moving on, Margo blows off her work duties and digs in for battle: “I really did try to do this the nice way – tried to be a friend to Curt and Jack, truly wanted to be a role model for Penny [their Chinese American daughter]. I wasn’t even bullshitting about building them a guest suite in the basement. We could have been one big, happy, transatlantic family – if only they hadn’t freaked the fuck out. Now I’m left with no choice. I have to find another path to the house.”
I won’t reveal the nature of that path here, nor will I hint at the lengths Margo will go to satisfy her obsessive desire for the couple’s house (and the blissful life she believes comes with it). Suffice it to say, you’ll never guess where the story is headed next, which is what will keep you turning pages at a breakneck speed.
Kashino – a former home and real estate journalist at The Washington Post and Washingtonian magazine – invests space and effort toward explaining how Margo became a manipulative, cynical, ruthless adult. This formative past includes witnessing her parents’ “messed-up” marriage; her father’s lies, and his failure to support the family in a consistent way; neglect, due to her single mom needing to work, and a teenaged older brother who can’t be bothered to care for Margo; and a much-beloved stray dog that her father up-sells as a purebred while she’s in school.
These vague, cursory attempts to fill in Margo’s backstory are less than satisfying, often coming off as narrative afterthoughts. Indeed, the dog story, which gets the most space and attention, explains Margo’s affection for dogs, and her profound sense of being treated unjustly, but it doesn’t remotely prepare us for the deep dive to come.
Even so, “Best Offer Wins” is an entertaining black comedy for our Zillow-as-house-porn era, reminding me that the things that stress us out most can often make great thriller fodder.
