It is January in Chicago, late at night, and cold enough that the tears on a young woman’s face are starting to freeze. She is standing on the platform at the Diversey stop, coming home from a party she should have enjoyed. A train pulls in. A man she knows far too well steps toward the doors, sees her, and says her first name, which he almost never uses. Then the doors close and he is gone. Neither of them mentions it for most of a year. If Not You by Ellen O’Clover is the story of what finally makes them talk about it.
The Night on the Diversey Platform
The woman is Mattie French, a copywriter at a small agency called the Art Room. The man is Campbell Porter, who works for Slater Faust, the prestigious firm where both of them once interned and only one of them was hired. He got the job. Three years later he won a Lion at the Cannes Lions festival for a sportswear campaign. She had been shortlisted the same night, and she watched him collect it.
So when both agencies make the final round for a luxury resort chain, and both teams are told they will spend a month living inside the brand, first in the Colorado mountains and then on a remote stretch of the Northern California coast, Mattie treats it as a war. Her art director, Dexter, would like her to treat it as a job.
The client, a brand director named Lucia with a weakness for mulberry silk, sets the two agencies a series of tests along the way. There is a headline contest against the clock, a pitch delivered on a sunlit terrace without slides, a trail ride, a spa day, a sunset cruise that leaves Dexter green at the rail. Each test is also a social experiment, since Lucia wants to see how each team behaves around its rivals. Mattie, who thinks best alone and in silence, is at a disadvantage in almost all of them. Campbell, who thinks out loud, is in his element, and his partner Soraya, the coolest person in any room, turns out to be fiercely loyal to him.
What If Not You by Ellen O’Clover does cleverly is interleave that month with brief chapters from their intern summer, five years earlier. Each flashback is a small correction. The boy she remembered as careless turns out to have been paying close attention to her, and the reading group will start to notice the pattern long before Mattie does.
If Not You and the Best Friend Problem
The heart of the novel is not the rivalry. It is Ava.
Mattie and Ava have been best friends since the third grade. They grew up in the same Illinois town, went to college together, moved to Chicago together and have shared an apartment ever since. The night on the train platform was the night Ava got engaged, and her fiance has since moved in so the couple can put money aside for a suburban house. Mattie has never wanted marriage. She does want Ava, permanently and in the next room.
O’Clover writes this with unusual honesty. Mattie is happy for her friend and frightened for herself at the same time, and ashamed of the fright. She is planning Ava’s bachelorette weekend in Miami from a luxury hotel room while dreading the moment the planning ends. Any reader who has watched a close friendship change shape around a wedding will recognise the particular loneliness of it.
What Campbell Is Carrying
Campbell’s secrets turn out to be heavier. His father, once his closest ally in a house full of sisters, has early-onset dementia and now lives in a memory care facility in North Carolina. Campbell has also spent four years writing a novel about memory and has just been told that no publisher wants it. He hides both behind loud shirts and louder jokes.
If Not You by Ellen O’Clover handles the father with great tenderness. The chapters set around his sister’s wedding, where the question is whether their dad can manage the walk down the aisle, are the finest in the book.
Where If Not You Stumbles
If Not You by Ellen O’Clover is a generous book, and its weaknesses are mostly structural.
- The breakup is telegraphed. An ugly remark from a senior colleague sends Mattie into a retreat that follows the genre’s script closely.
- The villain is flat. That colleague is a sexist and nothing else.
- The luxury detail repeats. Silk sheets and scented lobbies are funny twice, then less so.
One practical note for organisers: the second half contains several explicit, open-door love scenes, and the novel also deals with a parent’s dementia, a cat accidentally poisoned by a cannabis edible, and a senior colleague’s degrading remark. None of it is gratuitous, but groups should know going in.
Questions Worth Arguing About
Start with Mattie’s mother, a poet who stopped writing when she became pregnant and told her daughter that marriage and motherhood had ended her creative life. Ask the group whether Mattie’s ambition is her own or an inheritance, and whether the novel thinks women can in fact have both.
Then ask about Ava. If Not You by Ellen O’Clover takes seriously the idea that a friend’s wedding can feel like a bereavement. Ask whether Mattie’s fear is selfish, as she believes, or simply grief, as Campbell suggests, and whether the friendship survives because the two women finally say out loud what they have been avoiding.
Finally, ask about Campbell’s father. Campbell begins the book convinced that love is more painful than it is worth, having watched his mother lose her husband slowly. Ask the table whether his mother’s answer, given late in the novel, changes anyone’s mind.
For more in this key, The Heartbreak Hotel is O’Clover’s first adult novel and shares this one’s gentleness about loss. Book Lovers by Emily Henry suits a group that likes a workaholic heroine with a sister she would do anything for. Funny Story is the choice for a table interested in what happens when the person you planned your life around pairs off with someone else. And Great Big Beautiful Life offers another pair of writers competing for a single job.
What It Leaves Behind
The phrase at the centre of the book is the one on the award-winning campaign, the three words Campbell turned into a slogan and that Mattie has resented every time she has seen them on a billboard. Late in the novel the reader learns where those words actually came from. It would be a shame to say more.
What can be said is that If Not You by Ellen O’Clover is about the way two people can spend years misreading each other’s attention as hostility. It is warm, funny, often explicit, and sadder than its bright cover lets on. A book club will find plenty to fight about in its middle, and most readers will close it wanting to call their oldest friend.