Social Creature
Ratings7
Average rating3
15
Ratings7
Average rating3
"A sharp, biting, and irresistible debut about parties and ambition in New York City--introducing a talented Mr. Ripley for the digital age, with all the glitz and grit of Bright Lights, Big City. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. Louise Wilson is an expert at just barely making it. She's mastered the tricks and shortcuts that a penniless small-town girl needs to survive in New York City. When she meets the beautiful, wealthy, eccentric, and aimless Lavinia Williams, she thinks her dreams of a cosmopolitan existence may be coming true. Lavinia introduces her to a rarified life of beauty and indulgence: private opera boxes, secret bookstores in brownstones, Shakespearean masked balls, underground cabarets, closets full of hundreds of dresses, and the finest champagne money can buy. The more Louise tastes, the more she wants. Could she ever truly be a part of this world? She can speak with the right affectation, wear the best makeup, drop the appropriate references, but she is always afraid people can see her true nature, which is darker than anyone can imagine. She finds herself haunted by the disparity between them. Lavinia has so much, and Louise so little, despite her yearning. Nightlife--the music, the buzz, the dim lights--is the great equalizer. But morning always comes, and Louise will do whatever it takes to keep the party going. This delicious debut takes a classic tale of obsession and makes it undeniably modern"--
"Part THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, part Bret Easton Ellis's THE RULES OF ATTRACTION, about a small-town girl trying to survive in New York and become part of the city's literati, who forms an intense friendship with a troubled socialite, leading to extreme consequences"--
Reviews with the most likes.
This would be a great beach read. Filled with glamorous, substance addicted, self destructive rich people spending too much money and behaving shockingly. This is narrated by an outsider who becomes friends with the monsterous Lavinia. It makes a good point about the nefarious uses of social media. A page turning thriller filled with some suitably unpleasant characters.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand I found it a very absorbing and credible story about two “social creatures” in NY in 2015. Unvarnished and un-sensational–not easy to do. I went back to it eagerly and enjoyed it. On the other hand, it built to a sense of a revelatory ending, and then went in an entirely different direction. I would give it 3.5 stars if I could, but the accomplishment outweighs my misgivings about the ending. Kudos to Tara Isabella Burton.
I'm obviously in the minority with this rating but I absolutely hated this book.
First, when you compare something to The Talented Mr Ripley, you're basically giving away the plot from the get-go. For readers like me, who loved that book, it might not make a difference because we'll read it anyway, but then you need to write a book that stands up to the original. Unfortunately, for me, this one was not successful in that regard.
Louise, the “Ripley” character in this book, is not only obnoxiously unlikable but isn't at all sympathetic. She leaves home for unknown reasons and refuses to go back for unknown reasons, so she does whatever is necessary to stay in NYC, despite seeming to hate her life there. She meets Lavinia, a spoiled rich girl who seems to have endless amounts of money and no adult supervision or responsibilities. Fine - that's easy enough to believe. All of the characters, however, seem to live in this pseudo-Gastsby-esque world of drugs, drinking, and parties without any explanation as to why they are doing what they do. There's no motivation given for these characters, just their endless whirl of parties and operas and new dresses and expensive drinks. Everyone says they hate their parents but no reason is given for hating their parents. Everyone says they hate their friends but no reason is given for hating their friends. As a reader you're forced to take everything at face value but it's hard to do when you don't trust any of them and you hate all of them. At the end I found myself not caring much about what happened to anyone. Live...die...move to California and live on a commune...I did not care one whit.
The writing style made it difficult to read as well. It was a slowly paced book that consisted almost entirely of one drug-fueled outing after another (again, think Gatsby here), but with nothing interesting happening or substantive character development occurring in between, so the book dragged on endlessly. However, the narrative was almost entirely Louise's thoughts in a stream-of-consciousness form and it was frenzied in style, with endless run on sentences and abrupt changes in topic. It was just a deeply uncomfortable book to read without a clear reason to be that way. It took too much work and didn't feel worth it in the end.
The only interesting thing happening in this book is the author's use of social media to keep the plot moving, but in the end it wasn't enough to rescue this book from itself. It was an ambitious novel that just fell short for me.
(Thank you to NetGalley and Doubleday for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.)
