I picked up My Mortal Enemy due to the allegations of plagiarism leveled against Susan Sontag's In America, which was accused of lifting passages from this Willa Cather novella. While I think those allegations are wildly unfounded due to how little the two books have in common (seemingly one character and one line), I was happy to be led to this, objectively, better book.

In ways a predecessor to someone like Claire Keegan (most notably Small Things Like These), this quiet little book about the characters' fall from society seems to be akin to Great Gatsby in being a work to foretell the stock market crash and the Great Depression.