Review | In a sea of sad novels, ‘The Society of Shame’ dares us to laugh

The book centers on Kathleen Held, who catches her senatorial candidate husband with his pants down (literally) on their lawn with a young campaign aide, a redundancy that. Naturally, given our times, the episode is photographed and goes viral on social media. But Kathleen, with a gift for narcissism, feels the greater humiliation is that these images include her wearing bloodstained pants. She was not aware of this until an EMT on the scene tells her.

She also learns of a group called the Society of Shame, its members guilty of more egregious moments of their own doing — a popular novelist disparaging her readers on NPR, a movie star caught on tape objectifying a makeup artist, “the Moonabomber” caught baring his rear in a viral video, that sort of thing. The intention was to invite her husband, not Kathleen, the betrayed wife.

“My little group is for people who, like me, have been publicly shamed, fairly or unfairly,” its founder informs Kathleen. “You didn’t do anything except marry a philanderer” and, an assistant adds, experience a “feminine hygiene malfunction.”

Roper’s premise, by her own plotting, hangs on a slender tampon thread. Accidents happen. People can be forgiving, our attention spans rival the life cycle of a housefly — one of the plot’s premises — move on. Instead, the floodgates open.

Kathleen, stolid and endlessly self-denigrating — someone the late Helen Gurley Brown might deem “a mouseburger” — is given a makeover, rebranded “Kat” and instructed to ride that crimson tide of celebrity for as long as the public is interested, when all she ever wanted was to write a novel about the Greek goddess of magic and witchcraft Hecate.

“I’m not looking for a fling, and when I am, I’m going to steer clear of men who objectify women,” Kat announces. But the novel is obsessed with personal appearance. “She was small, round, and pug-nosed, with dark hair swirled atop her head, ruddy cheeks, and eyes like shiny black beads.” “A towering, horse-faced but nevertheless attractive blonde. “Kathleen had never quite understood her best friend’s breasts. They seemed to converge into one great mound in the middle of her chest.” And this is her best friend! Kat is a mean girl masquerading as milquetoast, and an equal-opportunity offender in trashing men’s looks, too.

“The Society of Shame” is often clever and inventive, charged with plenty of zingers, railing against Big Tampon. But cleverness can quickly wear out its welcome. At 360 pages, the book might have benefited by being shorter, brevity being the soul of wit and all. Roper commits to 28 chapters, numbered for the days of Kat’s infamy and the length of an average menstrual cycle. (See, clever.) Then, for good measure, she adds a couple more chapters, including a plot twist loudly telegraphed several chapters earlier.

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Kat is an accidental feminist, the semi-good wife of an ambitious pol in a novel that sends up all things earnest. As a feminist icon tells her at a #YesWeBleed rally in Washington: “I don’t recall writing about you. I wrote about the need for this movement. You just happened to bleed in the right place at the right time and be married to the right person.” She isn’t wrong.

Karen Heller is national features reporter for Style.

Anchor Books. 360 pp. $28