Review of the novel “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” by Rufi Thorpe

That quickly proves impossible, and her cry of despair is as loud as her baby’s cry. Two of her roommates (and her rent money) gone, Margo collapses on her bed with no extra hands to hold her son as she recovers from childbirth. All around her is “the echoing room where no one cares for her, worries about her, or helps her.”

Thorpe, a former PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, has demonstrated her writing agility and originality in three previous novels, but with Margo she has written a book that fits squarely in the present. Written alternately in first and third person, the plot deftly combines the travails of being a single mother with, improbably, professional wrestling and the online porn site OnlyFans. This is a case where more really is more. What could have been a disaster in someone else’s hands is an absolute delight in Thorpe’s.

Margo makes ends meet as a waitress but can’t afford the child care she needs to keep her job. The baby’s father fetishized Margo’s working-class life but wants nothing to do with reality: His family makes her sign a non-disclosure agreement for a pittance. Margo’s mother Shyanne, a former Hooters waitress who now works as a sales clerk at Bloomingdale’s, won’t take time off to help. And Margo’s father Jinx, a WWE Hall of Fame wrestler turned manager who was never around, is missing again.

Until he isn’t anymore. A few weeks after Bodhi’s birth, Jinx shows up at Margo’s door. Dressed in leather pants and with a serious heroin and opioid past, he’s not the babysitter Margo was expecting, but he takes care of Bodhi with complete ease, even though without steroids he’s “started to resemble a hairless cat.”

Fresh out of rehab and looking for a place to stay, Hex moves in and is unexpectedly full of fresh ideas. While watching wrestling with Margo, he mentions a wrestler who has made it on OnlyFans. When he drops that “she made more money there in a month than she did in a whole year of wrestling,” Margo immediately signs up. This is where the hilarity – and the thoughtful commentary on the sex industry, the difficulties of motherhood, love and found family – really begins.

Margo creates an account and begins studying successful OnlyFans stars to pursue business goals. She is intelligent, adventurous, and finds no shame in the work.

“This is what I have… this is how I can make it, and if it gives us security, a roof over our heads and diapers and clothes for Bodhi, then I don’t care,” she explains. “Where did this shame come from?” she asks herself. The answer: not from the women around her, not from her, but from pretty much everyone else.

While her father is initially biased, he soon gets involved in the way he knows best, showing off his marketing savvy, knowing that the acting allure of wrestling translates directly to porn. His advice: Margo needs a crew. Margo listens and teams up with two OnlyFans stars. Together they create social media for the highly visual world, blending TikTok and Instagram In with nudity.

In this way, Margo has turned online sex into a form of performance art, in which she scripts, directs, and creates worlds. Thorpe describes Margo’s work as feminist, not only because it allows for a flexible mothering/earning/learning experience, but also because Margo enjoys what she does.

“Margo’s Money Troubles” is fiery and at the same time darkly comic and gentle in the layers of love that build up in the moment a child is born. (The book is already set to be released as an Apple TV series starring Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman.) It is also about looking back at your former self with empathy.

“She felt incredibly stupid. Because she believed him, because she had an affair with him, because she had a uterus,” Margo, in the third person, tells readers about her relationship with her professor. And Margo, in the first person, is there to wash that away. “I like being myself now and observing my former self. It’s almost a way of loving myself. I’m stroking this girl’s cheek with my understanding.”

With Margo, Thorpe has given us a heroine to cheer for as she zigzags through a world where clothes are not required, building a brand new life for herself, fueled by ancient intelligence and maternal love.

Karin Tanabe is the author of six novels, including “An intelligent woman”, “The Gilded Years” and last “sunset crowd.”

Margo has money problems

William Morrow. 302 pages. $28