Alison Stewart: You are listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The new novel, Mutual Interest, by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith follows three New Yorkers trying to make money at the tail end of the Gilded Age, and they all have a secret. There's Vivian, who has fled a pretty boring life in Utica to come to the big city. She's used her secret romantic relationships with wealthy women to help elevate her status in society, but now she needs a husband to give her financial stability.

Vivian chooses Oscar, a neurotic businessman. Oscar is closeted, and Vivian thinks that by getting married, they can each continue their lives. Oscar's soap and perfume business started off as a success, but he soon runs into a big problem. A man named Squire, the son of a very wealthy old money family, is buying up all the materials that Oscar needs. Squire is an eccentric man with a passion for making scented candles. The only problem, they smell disgusting. Vivian decides to transform Oscar and Squire from enemies to business partners, and soon that partnership is not strictly about business, but in Gilded Age New York, exposure threatens to ruin everything Oscar, Vivian, and Squire have built.

Mutual Interest is out now, and on Thursday, March 20th, Olivia Wolfgang-Smith will be speaking at Pete's Candy store in Brooklyn, but first, she joins me now in studio. It's very nice to meet you.

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: What was the seed of the idea for this novel?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: There are a few answers to that. I think that the main seed was this little piece of historical trivia, which is that William Procter and James Gamble, who we know as Procter and Gamble, started out as professional nemeses before they were business partners. That's kind of as it's presented in the novel. One was a candlemaker, one was a soapmaker. They had this supply chain conflict where they had common raw materials.

What happened historically is that they happened to marry a pair of sisters, and once they were in the same family, the kind of forced proximity convinced them that they should be collaborating rather than enemies. I obviously took that and ran very far with it, made it a true love story, but that's the seed of the idea.

Alison Stewart: Where did you go? I mean, it's a love story, but you obviously have to have the Gilded Age details. Where did you do your research?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Research kind of happened in phases for this project, and I think the first phase arguably has been going on most of my life, which is just a real interest and obsession with this time period, things written in it, things written about it.

Every time I've ever gone to a museum or browsed through an archive, I've been very interested in the material culture and the aesthetics and just the worlds that this is set in. That kind of gave me-- when I decided to start writing this book, I wasn't just having talking heads in a white room, but then as I was writing and drafting, the research came sort of more directed by the characters and the plot of the book itself.

For instance, about a third of the way through the novel, there's this kind of characters have an emotional and physical altercation in a very public space in New York. I kind of got to do a little bit of a research scavenger hunt where I was going to museums and browsing the public library archives thinking, what's the most interesting place that they can have this public fight in 1905, and ended up with the answer of the New York Aquarium, which at the time was down in Battery Park at Castle Garden.

Alison Stewart: What books did you read about this age before you even started this book that really just sort of got your fires ignited to write?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Well, there are a lot of folks I'm cribbing from stylistically, Edith Wharton probably most of all.

Alison Stewart: Yes, I was going to say.

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Yes, her fiction was a huge inspiration, and then especially oddly, her book she co-wrote before she was ever a novelist, The Decoration of Houses, which is like an interior decor manual.

Alison Stewart: I didn't know that. Wow.

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Yes, and it's very kind of full of these very Wharton-esque strong opinions about what people should and should not be doing. Although in this case, it's about how to decorate your parlor and what kind of upholstery you should have on certain things. She's very against sliding doors, hates sliding doors. That book was actually a huge inspiration, and I kind of gave some of her opinions to various characters.

Alison Stewart: Well, what did you learn what life would be like for queer New Yorkers during this period?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Yes, doing research into queer life and queer community in this historical era can be a very intense experience. It can be a very joyful experience. It was kind of therapeutic for me a lot of the time. There were certain kind of centers of queer life that I kind of knew about going into it in Lower Manhattan and in Harlem and on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Really the headline overall was that queer people of all persuasions and personalities were making lives for themselves all over the city then as now, and that can be a little bit hard to ascertain in the historical record. Labels and identities have shifted. Things are left out on purpose or with malicious intent by people outside the community. Yes, there's a lot of great expertise from historians that I, as a layperson novelist, am able to lean on in learning about this history.

Alison Stewart: It was sort of interesting because Vivian sometimes lived with her female lovers, whereas Oscar, his were more in secret. Was there a differentiation between women and men?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Yes, I think that there was much more sort of legal policing of male homosexuality and the way that women Vivian in the novel were sort of often able to get away with a little bit more.

Alison Stewart: Oh, two women living together, right?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Yes. There's a little bit more of fuzziness of what people sort of thought was going on, so what she was able to get away with.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, author of the new book, Mutual Interest. It's about three gay people who enter into a business arrangement in Gilded Age New York and are hoping to avoid being outed by high society. Soap and candlemaking, does that relate back to the Procter and Gamble of it all?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Yes, that is part of it that I kind of, starting with that idea, beginning knowing that that was the business that those two men were in. That's where I began. Obviously, I guess I could have changed that to a different industry if I had wanted to, but I found myself very compelled by that field as to be the one that these three queer people were collaborating in and building this business empire.

Something about the way that that personal care industry, so cosmetics, soap, candles, fragrances. The way that it is sort of this double edged sword of being a tool of self expression and maybe gender expression and maybe particularly resonant for queer people and the tension against how that industry from the very beginning has been used as a source of capitalist manipulation of shame to make people not want to express themselves or to try to fit a more societal standardized norm. I just found that a very compelling tension for these characters to be working through.

Alison Stewart: When we first meet Vivian, what does she want out of life?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Oh, gosh, I think she wants to be able to invent herself, I guess, to invent a new life for herself. We meet her as a very ambitious, driven force of nature coming out of Central New York, basically running away from home as a teenager. She gets to New York City on vacation with a wealthy friend and just doesn't leave, basicallu.

I think that she's a little bit of a-- I've heard her described as ahead of her time, which I kind of get in the sense that she is very ambitious and has expectations that she should be in control of her own life that kind of don't fit her gender and societal moment historically, but I think that she would be a standout in any era, that she's this very intense, almost Machiavellian person.

Alison Stewart: Well, how do her desires line up with the goals of being the new wife of Oscar?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: I think that she understands that past a person, a certain point because of where and when she lives, she needs to have a man who she can kind of be the mastermind, puppet master of. Oscar is a great candidate for that as he's very vulnerable to suggestion.

Alison Stewart: For Oscar?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Yes, that's right. They are great partners in that way where it's very much not an equal partnership, but I think they both understand and are comfortable with their roles there.

Alison Stewart: You learn that Oscar has known from a young age that he was gay. This is a line you write. The revelation of his own queerness clocked him like a sucker punch. How does he cope with how he feels about himself? How does Oscar cope with how he feels about himself?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: That's kind of the project of his life. That's sort of the evolution of his coping is sort of one of his main stories throughout the book. I think that early on when we're first meeting him, he's really uncomfortable with himself and trying very hard to repress himself quite unsuccessfully and having a lot of fun during the times that he's not repressing himself, but sort of trying to outrun and escape and always being-- heading to New York for him is trying to get out, get away from himself in that way.

Alison Stewart: Our third person is Squire. Is sex or romance, is that really his priority?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Squire grows up kind of in quarantine, I would say. He's a very eccentric young man in a very old money pseudo-aristocratic family and is kind of-- he has all of these obsessive hobbies and hyperfixations and his parents are afraid of him as a potential social scandal, so sort of keep him away from others. I don't think that he sort of has time before we meet him before the book starts. He's not really had an opportunity to ascertain what his priorities are in regard to other people, including romantically. That's kind of one of his projects over the course of the book is to find a place where he can be his eccentric self in community.

Alison Stewart: Why did you name him Squire?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: It's a very, very small kind of throwaway moment that passes in the book, but it's actually part of his mother's maiden name. I just felt that he had come from a class where that was likely to have been part of how he was named.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned all of his obsessions, his obsessions with trains and I think sewer systems. One or two reviews have noted that possibly he had undiagnosed autism. Was that ever part of your plan?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: I think that if Squire were alive today, it is likely that he would have been diagnosed somewhere on the autism spectrum. I think that part of what this book is about is about identities and labels and the ways that they maybe don't always overlap. Precisely that people of all types have existed as long as people have existed, whatever the shifting labels might be. That's one way that I think that Squire is certainly kind of searching for understanding and community, as many of the characters are in this book in different ways.

Alison Stewart: Who is the narrator of your book?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: That's such a good question. I appreciate that sort of accusatory way of asking.

Alison Stewart: Who is the narrator?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: I've started to hear this from different folks in similar ways. This book has a very high omniscient narrator who knows everything about our three protagonists, but also secondary, tertiary characters, all of time and space going backward and forward, and is also a very intrusive narrator. We'll kind of like butt into the action to sort of comment on and push back on things the characters are saying, sort of bring up some hypocrisies or context that the characters might be wishing wouldn't be brought up.

I think that it's a very strong voice, so I understand why people are curious about who the narrator is. There's not one answer to the question. I think that, if anything, as I've been thinking about it, as people have been beginning to ask, I have a sense of sort of queer historical collective and-

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: -the idea of this sort of commentary of queer community in the past and future, watching this love story unfold between these three people, but really, I started because it's like a pastiche of this style that was common to turn of the century novels of having these very omniscient, kind of intrusive, affectionately judgmental, kind of social satire narrators. It was just such a pleasure to write. I really ran away with it once I was going.

Alison Stewart: It's so funny that so many people have had that reaction. I just said something about the time or something about the way books are written now or the way books were written then.

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Yes, I think it was much more common then than it is now and that might be part of it, but yes, it's a very strong voiced novel and I think it makes sense that it is a question that is begged.

Alison Stewart: We've got all the main characters. The big question is, what risk does exposure pose to Oscar, Vivian, and Squire?

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Wow, that's a very multivalent question because they're collaborating in a lot of ifferent projects that are all, to some extent, secret. There are obvious legal, reputational, physical safety risks to their queer, domestic, romantic, sexual relationship coming out, and then also their business relationship is also a little bit honestly scandalous given the fact that Vivian is sort of the head of the empire kind of acting behind the image of Squire and Oscar. I think that they are working in a very delicate balance in a lot of different ways.

Alison Stewart: To find out what happens, you should read Mutual Interest. It is by my guest, Olivia Wolfgang-Smith. Thank you so much for being with us. We appreciate it.

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith: Thank you so much for having me.