OTHER PEOPLE’S FUN, by Harriet Lane In the opening pages of Harriet Lane’s short, sharp novel “Other People’s Fun,” the book’s narrator, Ruth, runs into a former classmate named Sookie at their old English boarding school while attending a teacher’s memorial. They were not friends, but acquaintances. The best Ruth hoped for, “socially, was to fly under the radar”; Sookie, sidling about “smelling of Marlboro reds and Rive Gauche,” used to borrow Ruth’s essays.