In Angelica Baker’s sophomore novel “When We Grow Up,” a group of friends approaching thirty gather for a vacation in Hawai’i, where the tropical paradise serves as both backdrop and contrast to their increasingly fraught relationships. Baker, whose debut “Our Little Racket” explored the aftermath of a financial crisis through multiple female perspectives, returns with a sharper, more intimate focus on the complexities of longstanding friendships and the painful process of maturing in a world that seems increasingly unstable.
Set over a week in January 2018, the novel follows Clare, a married writer who hasn’t finished the novel she sold at auction, as she joins five high school friends: Renzo, the narcissistic center of their social circle; Kyle, the peacemaking rich kid; Mac, who’s silently outgrowing the group; Jessie, obsessed with her new boyfriend; and Liam, with whom Clare begins a reckless affair. The trip is immediately disrupted by the real-life Hawaiian missile alert of January 2018—a false alarm, but one that forces the friends to briefly confront their mortality before retreating into their usual patterns of evasion and performance.
Relentless Self-Awareness Without Self-Improvement
What distinguishes Baker’s novel is its unflinching portrayal of educated millennial self-awareness that never quite translates into meaningful change. Clare and her friends know exactly what’s wrong with them—they constantly analyze their own behavior and motivations—but this knowledge doesn’t lead to growth. Instead, they remain trapped in cycles of mutual antagonism and dependency.
This dynamic is best exemplified in Clare’s relationship with Renzo, the gay man who has served as her confidant since adolescence. Their connection is defined by barbed affection, with Renzo frequently undercutting Clare’s pretensions while she enables his worst impulses. During one particularly brutal dinner argument, Renzo tells her: “You’re so proud of your own self-awareness…I liked you better, frankly, when you spent your days tap-dancing to avoid anyone realizing that your house didn’t have a swimming pool. At least you weren’t constantly keeping score.”
Baker carefully unfolds the group’s history through flashbacks to their teenage years in Los Angeles, revealing how their adult identities were formed in relation to one another. These sections are among the novel’s strongest, capturing the potent mixture of competition, attraction, and performance that defines adolescent friendship groups:
“Renzo was the one person she never wanted to see that she was afraid. And here he is now, still doing the crossword, still reminding her how insufferable he finds her choices.”
The Personal and Political Intertwined
The novel’s political context—a year into the Trump presidency—adds an important dimension without overwhelming the personal drama. Baker shows how the friends’ political posturing reveals more about their self-image than their actual commitments. During a heated argument about student protests and climate change, the characters talk past one another, each more concerned with demonstrating their moral superiority than engaging with the issues:
“If you’re a selfish person, does it make any sense to trust that you’ll one day be able to identify how it might feel, for once, to be unselfish?”
This struggle between self-interest and social responsibility extends to the characters’ treatment of one another. Mac, the sole Black member of the group, delivers a devastating assessment of their friendship when he tells Clare: “I can never really just be when I’m with you all, and there’s other good stuff, obviously, but it’s still…there.” His confession spotlights how even close friends can fail to recognize the full humanity of people they claim to love.
Prose That Cuts Like Glass
Baker’s prose style is one of the novel’s great pleasures—precise, witty, and unflinching. She has a gift for crystallizing complex emotional states in memorable phrasing:
“There is something almost delicious about watching Renzo and Mac align themselves against Jessie, against the man she’s sleeping with. Clare cannot be the only one thinking this.”
The novel particularly excels in its depictions of how people navigate social situations, constantly calculating how they’re being perceived. During one beach scene, Clare observes: “She feels like she’s watching it happen already. She feels like someone has helped her onto a train, she’s realizing she has no way of speaking with the conductor, no say in the matter.”
Strengths That Set “When We Grow Up” Apart
- Character complexity – Each character contains multitudes, with even the most frustrating personalities revealed to have depths and vulnerabilities that explain, if not excuse, their behavior.
- Dialogue that rings true – The friends speak in a shorthand developed over decades, full of inside jokes and charged silences. Baker never explains too much, trusting readers to intuit the subtext.
- Emotional fearlessness – The novel refuses to look away from uncomfortable truths about how people use and hurt one another, particularly Clare’s infidelity, which is neither romanticized nor overly condemned.
- Structural elegance – Alternating between present-day Hawai’i and flashbacks to pivotal moments in Los Angeles, the novel gradually unveils the history that binds these friends together.
- Social observation – Baker has a keen eye for the specific anxieties and contradictions of educated millennials: their tendency to intellectualize emotions, their paralysis in the face of climate change, their complicated relationship with privilege.
Areas Where the Novel Could Go Further
While “When We Grow Up” succeeds brilliantly on its own terms, some readers might wish for:
- More resolution – The novel’s ending, while emotionally truthful, leaves many storylines unresolved. This is clearly intentional but might frustrate readers seeking catharsis.
- Deeper exploration of certain characters – Kyle remains somewhat underdeveloped compared to the others, and Geoff (Jessie’s boyfriend) functions more as plot device than fully realized character.
- Broader social context – While the novel touches on race, class, and politics, it could delve even deeper into how these forces shape the characters’ lives and choices.
- More moments of joy – The relentless examination of dysfunction, while compelling, occasionally feels overwhelming. A few more glimpses of genuine connection might have provided welcome contrast.
For Fans of Complex Literary Fiction
Baker’s novel will appeal to readers who appreciate the psychological depth of Sally Rooney, the sharp dialogue of Meg Wolitzer, and the social observation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” Like those writers, Baker understands how personal relationships are shaped by broader cultural forces without reducing her characters to mere symbols.
“When We Grow Up” also shares DNA with novels like Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children” and Emma Straub’s “The Vacationers,” both of which examine group dynamics in privileged circles with a similarly unsparing eye. However, Baker distinguishes herself through her willingness to push her characters toward genuine moral reckoning rather than settling for ironic distance.
Final Thoughts: A Novel That Lingers
What remains with the reader long after finishing “When We Grow Up” is its emotional honesty about the gap between who we imagine ourselves to be and who we actually are. Clare’s realization near the end captures this perfectly:
“Pose long enough as a novelist, as an engaged and devoted citizen of some wider community, as the sort of woman who acts. Pose long enough as a wife and eventually it will mean something in her bones, it will become her identity on a molecular level, she will not conveniently forget she’s married one night when she’s had too much to drink and feels lonely”
Baker’s novel suggests that adulthood isn’t about achieving perfect consistency between beliefs and actions—an impossible standard—but rather about acknowledging the messy contradictions that make us human. In an era that often demands performative virtue, there’s something refreshing about characters who admit their own hypocrisy, even if they can’t transcend it.
With its combination of biting wit and emotional depth, “When We Grow Up” confirms Baker as a significant voice in contemporary fiction—one uniquely attuned to the anxieties and aspirations of her generation. It’s that rare novel that entertains while prompting genuine self-reflection, asking us to consider whether we, too, might be posing as the adults we thought we would become.
