Texas Book Festival 2015: The Clasp

Class striving is not a new thing, although its modern iteration certainly puts a unique spin on an age-old complaint: Now the have-plentys – but never have-enough! – take obsessively art-directed selfies at overpriced brunches and Pinterest-board Williams-Sonoma copper-pot porn.

In 1884, Guy de Maupassant hit the nail on his own era’s head, dramatizing what it was like to “suffer endlessly” as a lower-class born coveting what the well-heeled had in “The Necklace.”

That class complaint fuels essayist Sloane Crosley’s first foray into novel-writing, and that hallowed short story engines the plot of the book’s second half. The first half amounts to a prolonged “getting to know you,” split between three narratives told by college friends reuniting at a wedding a decade later. Victor never fit in with his more monied classmates, but he seems to revel in his position as an underdog, and a dyspeptic point of difference to his blithely privileged former chums. Kezia is the woman he’s always pined for, although her post-collegiate life hasn't turned out swimmingly; she’s now the harried assistant to a jewelry designer who’s frankly a horrible human. Kezia still wrestles with a long-ago crush on Nathaniel – inconveniently Victor’s closest friend – while Nathaniel, tapped for greatness early on as a fiction writer, is slowly dying inside trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood as a sitcom writer.

A Thurber Prize finalist in her previous incarnation as a sharp-tongued culture commentator, Crosley has lost none of her wit or witheringness in turning to fiction. Her observations – “you had to be a millionaire in New York to expose the back of your furniture” – remain ingenious and pointed, but the pacing of this book-length narrative is puzzling. The narrative’s clever counterpoint to de Maupassant’s own life and his defining necklace – which the novel posits may in fact be real, and ferreted away in a French chateau by a lovelorn Nazi officer – only crystallizes in the book’s second part; for a madcap caper, it takes an awful long time to get to the actual capering. (Also strangely delayed is the subject of Nathaniel’s broken heart by a girl named Bean; given the many passages devoted to his perspective, it’s curious how long the book takes to introduce her.) But the book benefits hugely from the second part’s more scampering tempo, and its defining preoccupation is a doozy: How many years we can devote to yearning for someone or something out of habit (as Victor explains his feelings for Kezia: “he was just so accustomed to the steady hum of wanting her”). Playing off of de Maupassant’s original story of desperate longing and ironic denouement, The Clasp has plenty to say – and with a sly sense of humor – about our current sorry condition.

The Clasp
by Sloane Crosley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $26

Sloane Crosley will appear at the Texas Book Festival session "On Motivation" with Jami Attenberg and Sung J. Woo Sat., Oct. 17, 1:45-2:45pm, at Central Presbyterian Church, 200 E. Eighth.