logo

62 pages 2 hours read

Pretty Things

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Character Analysis

Nina Ross (Ashley Smith)

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of suicide, murder, and sexual abuse.

Nina Ross is the primary protagonist of the story. Although Janelle Brown alternates between Vanessa and Nina, Nina has the first word and the last word, indicating that she, not Vanessa, is the main character. Nina primarily drives the plot; without her plan to scam Vanessa, there is no story.

Though Nina is a grifter, Brown’s writing prompts the reader to root for her and take her side. She’s not an indiscriminate criminal: She does not steal too much, and she only targets people who she considers wealthy and deserving of it. As Nina says, “don’t get greedy” and “only steal from those who can afford it” (22). This mantra turns Nina into a Robin Hood archetype. There is also a life-or-death motivation behind Nina’s grifts. Her mom’s cancer bills are approaching seven figures—robbing the wealthy is how Nina pays for her mom’s treatments. Nina puts herself in risky situations to keep her mom alive.

Like her mom, Nina can be tough, which Brown conveys through blunt language. Once she finds out about Lily’s scams, she ditches her and doesn’t look back. She tells her, “You’ll do what you always do. But this time when you screw it all up, I won’t be there to help you” (457). Nina also stands up to Benny’s dad, William, declaring, “You can’t tell me what to do. We love each other” (123). These monosyllabic speeches create the effect of bluntness.

Initially, Nina acts tough about conning Vanessa. She feels that Vanessa’s family capsized her bright future and deserves to be a target. As she is about to enter Vanessa’s life as Ashley, Nina states, “I am a category 5 hurricane coming her way, and she has no clue” (131). In this sense, she deifies herself, which maps onto her sense of what the internet allows people to do. She is forceful and wants to destroy Vanessa’s world. At the same time, Nina is kind and understanding. Her compassion shines when she starts to doubt the justification for robbing Vanessa. As she interacts with Vanessa offline and in reality, she realizes that “[i]t’s much harder to judge when someone is in your face, human in their vulnerability” (256). Indeed, Brown makes it hard for the reader to judge Nina with her Robin Hood-like crimes.

Nina is “pretty” but not “[n]ot the sexiest girl in the club” (15). Vanessa describes Nina as “unsettlingly pretty” (142) and wonders if she’s Jewish or Latina. Bouncers, too, wonder about her ethnicity: “[M]aybe a hint of Spanish or Latina?” (15). Though Nina is not an Instagram influencer, she has what the cultural critic Jia Tolentino calls “Instagram face,” meaning “distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic” (“The Age of Instagram Face.” The New Yorker, 12 Dec 2019). Brown hence uses Nina’s physicality to explore the harms of social media. Nina has two romantic interests: Lachlan “is a reliable partner, but not a very good boyfriend” (30), and Benny is her true love. As Nina winds up with Benny (though not in an explicitly romantic relationship), her character gets an ambiguous happy ending.

Vanessa Liebling

Vanessa Liebling provides the second point of view of the story and, at first, a foil for Nina. She has what Nina does not: money and opportunity. While Nina attends “a middling liberal arts college on the East Coast” (128), Vanessa goes to Princeton. As Nina pulls grifts to pay for her mom’s supposed cancer treatments, Vanessa leads a glamorous life that she publicizes on Instagram.

In Part 1, from Nina’s point of view, Vanessa is the antagonist and the enemy. She’s a “deluded elitist” who’s “shallow at heart” and “skilled at nothing but self-aggrandizement” (56). Nina links Vanessa to the Liebling family and the theft of her future. Nina states, “I never forgave them for it” (129). Her merciless contempt for Vanessa makes the reader feel like she’s a villain.

In Part 2, when Vanessa gets to tell the story, her character changes. She gradually develops from antagonist to protagonist. She stops being a “pretty thing” and becomes a person with feelings and layers. Brown uses Vanessa’s honesty to disarm the reader and aid the transition from antagonist to protagonist. Vanessa is not unaware of what the reader might think of her and calls them out on their presumptions. Addressing the reader as a social media follower, she claims: “You can’t stop yourself from clicking on my name even though you tell everyone that you hate me” (138). Like Nina, Vanessa can be confrontational. She provides a blunt, transparent assessment of her influencer life. She wonders “[h]ow many times have I stood and chirped giddily for the camera […] when inside all I wanted to do was drink a bottle of Drano?” (144-45). Like Nina, Vanessa is conscientious. She sees the shallowness of the influencer milieu. When her dad died, her influencer friends “sent texts, but didn’t pick up the phone” (215). Vanessa wants depth and meaningful friendships.

As Vanessa’s character develops, the reader realizes that she is not Nina’s enemy or foil. The two have much in common. Through the motif of inheritance, Brown gives Vanessa and Nina parallel narratives that diverge based on what they inherited from their respective families. Like Nina, Vanessa has a sense of justice and vengeance. When she reads Judith’s diaries and connects her mom’s suicide to William’s affair with Lily, she makes Nina a target. Once again, Vanessa’s and Nina’s stories double each other’s. Nina thinks that Vanessa and her family ruined her life, making it acceptable to rob her. Vanessa thinks Nina and her mom ruined her life, making it acceptable to take her husband. Vanessa turns Michael/Lachlan into a symbol of “family, security, happiness, sanity. Love” (363). Vanessa’s belief that Michael is a victim makes her somewhat naïve, and Brown uses this character trait to maintain the story’s suspense since Vanessa has to think that Nina cons Michael.

Vanessa herself takes on grift-like practices like Nina. She hides her pregnancy and depleted wealth from Michael, and she spots incongruencies between Ashley’s and Michael’s stories and actions. She notices Ashley is out of breath on the hike even though she’s a yogi. She looks into Michael’s background and learns unnerving information. In Part 4, Brown employs features of heroines in a Gothic novel to characterize Vanessa: She is beset by forces that she does not understand. Benny becomes her confidante, and Vanessa ceases to be Nina’s foil completely when she teams up with Nina.

As Vanessa bails Nina out of jail and pays for her expensive lawyer, Vanessa turns into her rescuer and benefactor. She hence develops from antagonist to hero. She also becomes her employer and family member—Nina lives with her and works for her. However, despite this development in narrative function, Vanessa’s character doesn’t undergo a total transformation: She remains online. However, living with Nina, Benny, and her daughter Daisy, Vanessa has a family. Vanessa, like Nina, gets a happy ending, though once shrouded in ambivalence about social media.

Benjamin “Benny” Liebling

Benny, Vanessa’s brother, is believed to have a mental health condition by those around him, especially his parents. However, Benny subverts the legitimacy of his supposed condition when he quips to Nina, “[a]pparently if you don’t like to participate in things you must be mentally ill” (90). In keeping with the novel’s thematic surveillance, Benny suffers from feeling surveilled by his mother, something that is extended when he spends much of the novel in the Orson Institute, from which he attempts to escape. Benny forms a unique relationship with Nina during high school, and Vanessa encourages it, thinking Nina will help Benny adjust. Vanessa is the one who rescues Nina, however, and so Brown does not make Benny an archetypal romantic hero; relatedly, his relationship with Nina is left ambiguous at the end of the novel.

Benny is a foil for Vanessa. Vanessa says, “I knew how to play my role and hit those benchmarks.” As for Benny, he’s “irreparable” (156). His disturbing drawings and relationship with the working-class Nina make him an outsider and a source of worry for their parents. As the ideal daughter, Vanessa is juxtaposed with her rebellious brother, who supposedly has a mental health condition. Nina has to take care of her family (her mom and medical bills), and Vanessa has to care for her family. Both characters are under pressure.

Lachlan O’Malley (Michael O’Brien)

Lachlan is Nina’s romantic interest and partner in crime. Nina refers to him as her boyfriend, and they grift together. At first, Brown makes Lachlan’s characterization ambiguous: While the reader does not have a reason to like Lachlan (aside from his connection to Nina), they do not have a reason to dislike him. She foreshadows his villainous character arc when he vanishes for weeks and does not return Nina’s call, but Nina needs “him too much to press the subject” (31). Concerning their joint cons, he is dependable, and that is what matters most to Nina. Lachlan Nina’s sidekick at first. He helps her steal from the rich so that she can pay her mom’s medical bills.

Lachlan knew Nina’s mom from poker games, and Lily introduces Lachlan to Nina, something through which Brown represents patterns of grooming. This is reinforced by the fact that it is later revealed that Lachlan was himself a victim of grooming and sexual abuse as a child when lost his virginity to his 18-year-old babysitter—he does not see it as abuse. As the story unfolds, Brown makes Lachlan’s character less ambiguous as his behavior grows more toxic. Nina’s antagonist isn’t Vanessa, and Vanessa’s antagonist isn’t Nina: the villain becomes Lachlan/Michael. He tips off the cops to get Nina in jail and out of the way. Once he discovers that Vanessa has no money, he plans to get her to rewrite her will and then kill her so that he, not Benny, will inherit Stonehaven.

Unlike Nina, Lachlan is not a Robin Hood archetype; he commit crimes indiscriminately. Brown uses him to symbolize misogyny. While Brown compares him with the figure of the femme fatale, his seduction of Vanessa upholds gendered hierarchies given the power dynamic that he exploits. Part of the initial grift involves Michael flirting with Vanessa. When she asks them to go on a hike, he shows her “a toned expanse of stomach” (272). Lachlan becomes a “pretty thing,” yet his agency is dangerous. His death symbolizes Vanessa and Nina’s triumph over inimical patriarchal forces.

Lily Ross

As one of two flaws maternal characters in the novel, Lily does not provide Nina with stability or a good role model. After Lily sees Nina’s dad (a Colombian card player) hit Nina, she ditches him and becomes a single mom who evokes the reader’s sympathy. To keep Nina fed and housed, Lily cons people and moves her around the country. Lily comes from a family with Mafia connections. Brown constructs the relationship between Lily and Nina to explore the motif of inheritance. Nina states that “I come from a long line of bagmen and petty thieves, opportunists and outright criminals” (42). Yet Lily, sensing her daughter’s intelligence, doesn’t want her to grow up to be a grifter. She, too, sacrifices, and tries to give her daughter a different life. Once the reader discovers Lily’s affair with William Liebling and her fraudulent cancer diagnosis, Lily has the opposite trajectory to Vanessa: she moves from sympathetic figure to antagonist.

Judith Liebling and William Liebling IV

While Vanessa did not have to worry about money or opportunities growing up, she, too, had a tempestuous family life. Her grandma threatens to spank her, and while Judith tries to protect her, her mental health conditions obstruct her ability to care for Vanessa and Benny. William is also presented as another harmful father figure in the book. When she is little, William tells Vanessa that most people are “hamsters spinning on their wheels, never quite getting ahead,” but he adds, “[d]on’t worry. That will never be a problem for you, cupcake” (155). The sweetness in the word “cupcake” is used to obfuscate the harm inherent in his comment. Via the motif of inheritance, Brown juxtaposes William’s statement with the working-class women whom Nina sees in jail. Brown portrays William as the grotesque patriarch. Vanessa describes him as “hideously ugly, objectively speaking; but that wasn’t what mattered to some women. Power is its own aphrodisiac” (171). His affair with Lily drives Judith to suicide.

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
Unlock IconUnlock all 62 pages of this Study Guide

Plus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.

Including features:

+ Mobile App
+ Printable PDF
+ Literary AI Tools