I just finished reading two very odd books. Well, it’s more accurate to say that they were odd choices for me. But they’re also rather odd in and of themselves. I chose these books because I like the author as a political commentator and TV personality and when I found out that she had written some books a few years ago, I decided to read them.
The author is Molly Jong-Fast, and these books, published years ago, are Girl (Maladjusted), a memoir of life as the child of a very famous author; and The Social Climber’s Handbook, a novel.
The latter, based on my cursory review of a review, was what I expected would be a satire of New York 21st century finance bro society, and it is. But it’s violent, too, and much more violent than humorous or satiric. Think of The Devil Wears Prada with a little bit of American Psycho and a lot of Bonfire of the Vanities, and you’ll have an idea of what Jong-Fast was trying for but did not quite accomplish with this book.
The Bonfire influence is clear - Jong-Fast’s male characters think of themselves as Masters of the Universe, and Sherman McCoy’s name is dropped frequently. The American Psycho influence is clear, too, with heartless, wealth-obsessed characters who seem to care about nothing except real estate, fashion, expensive cars and travel, the right handbags, the right shoes and jewelry and art, blah blah blah. I’m sure the shallow materialism that Jong-Fast is trying to depict here is based on something real but even in 2010 or so, the late 90s / early 21st century socialite with a Birkin was a tired trope of the satiric New York chick lit genre.
And speaking of New York chick lit (such a terrible term but sometimes you have to use icky jargon to make a point quickly), there’s a small element of that present here too. The book’s title is (misleadingly) reminiscent of chick lit classics like The Nanny Diaries or Bergdorf Blondes or The Devil Wears Prada. The cover, however, hints at something quite different. The blonde woman in the perfectly tailored LBD in the foreground is holding a knife behind her back, and the pen and ink rendering of NYC (against a background that is purple, not pink) resembles an Edward Gorey drawing. The title says frothy romance blended with satire blended with Jane Austen-like observations of the manners and customs of very wealthy and very shallow young New Yorkers, but the cover cautions the reader to expect some mayhem.
But I didn’t expect any such thing because I read the Kindle edition and hadn’t seen the cover design, and the very cursory review that I barely glanced at did not mention that the main character is a serial killer, so the first murder took me by surprise. I went in thinking that I was about to read a sharper and funnier version of The Devil Wears Prada. But it’s actually a bit of a bloodbath.
I’m not opposed to a literary bloodbath now and then, but it has to make sense. This one doesn’t really make very much sense, although you can easily see why Daisy chooses her victims. That’s part of the problem, really. The reader sees the murders coming from a mile away, and we also never hear a word from the victims. We know when Daisy is about to murder someone, and then we know when that person is dead, but we don’t know anything about the murder itself other than a cursory mention of the method. And it’s not that I want a graphic description of pain and gore - that is really just the opposite of what I want. But I do want to know about the encounter between the victim and the murderer. I want to know what they said to one another. Did Daisy tell her victims what they did to offend her? Did they beg for mercy? Or did she just sneak up and attack them? I have no idea. And I don’t really care that much because Daisy is not a very interesting character, and it’s just not a very good book.
One thing I have found as a reader is that if you want to write about the rich and their preoccupations, you have to have a little bit of compassion for them, even the worst of them. To write about your characters’ human failings, you have to recognize their humanity. The Social Climber's Handbook mostly fails to do this, because every single character is absolutely vile. Even the children are repellent. In a comic murder novel, you should at least have some amused though horrified respect for the killer. Even when you know that the victims are way overdue for a catastrophic downfall, you should also be able to pity them when it actually happens, just a little bit. And even if you know that the killer will never be caught, there shouldn’t be a lot of loose ends left hanging. The ending of a novel about a murdering socialite doesn’t need to be morally satisfying but it should at least be tidy.
As I said, I like Molly Jong-Fast very much as a political writer and TV personality. She comes across as both brilliant and wise, and she also projects warmth and kindness that I can’t believe are fake. Maybe that is why this novel is just not very good. Maybe you need a certain amount of cruelty to write a good satirical novel about a murderous Upper East Side socialite.
*****
Girl (Maladjusted) is a memoir. I actually read it first, and I'm glad I did because if I'd read The Social Climber's Handbook first, I probably wouldn't have bothered with this one. Jong-Fast wrote Girl when she was in her 20s, which is actually a fine time to write a memoir of youth because people in their 20s remember their childhood and teenage years with detail and immediacy if not perspective.
A lot of this book reads as juvenilia. The young Jong-Fast was very obviously trying for a cynical and wise but flippant voice that she mostly achieves, but it comes across as inauthentic - more on why in just a minute. She’s much harder on herself than you might expect a young memoirist to be - she depicts herself as whiny, spoiled, and manipulative, and maybe she was but probably no more so than any other girl her age. Teenagers can be whiny and spoiled and manipulative but they're mostly lovely and hilarious. I know this because I've owned my own teenagers.
The arch, hyper-ironic, world-weary young person in New York tone is alternatingly funny and annoying, and more of the latter than the former. But just as I started to write this whole book off as the self-involved prattling of a literary nepo baby, Jong-Fast would drop an amazingly beautiful and truthful observation about her life or her family, and you know right away that she’s neither cynical nor spoiled and solipsistic. Her compassion for humanity, almost absent in The Social Climber’s Handbook, is on full display here. Molly Jong-Fast was probably lovely and hilarious as a teenager.
Flannery O’Connor once said something about a talent for writing not being the same as a talent for writing anything. Flannery wasn’t right about everything, but she was right about that. Molly Jong-Fast is not a novelist, but I’ll be first in line to read her commentary, and I’m all in if she writes another memoir.
