REIVEW | Sloane Crosley’s The Clasp | Picador.

The Clasp, 2015

Sloane Crosley’s The Clasp is a novel. This may surprise you, since Crosley is famous for her essays.

The Clasp is also the first thing I read by Crosley that I liked. Liked rather unequivocally, that is.

I’ve been a bitch about Crosley in the past. I bought her first book of essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (2008) at a Goodwill in Toronto, knowing absolutely nothing about it. And I read it immediately, loved bits of it, and hated others.

Most of all, I hated Crosley, not because she is deserving (I don’t know the woman), but I think because I am instinctively, irrationally jealous of her.

She’s nearly my age, and she writes funny essays that are praised by the literati. She lives in New York City, apparently in relative comfort and without roommates, and while at the time she worked in book publishing (not as an editor, but still), now she’s a full-time, for-real, best-selling writer. Oh and she’s pretty. Painfully (by the looks of things) thin. Long-haired. White. She’s got that stupid white-girl name, Sloane, which is an affront to the Jennifer juggernaut. (Listen, Sloane is not a fair name for a girl born in 1978.) But mostly, I think it’s just that she’s thin. Lollipop-head thin. She’s got everything this particular recovering anorexic longed for.

By appearances alone, Sloane Crosley is eminently hateable. Which is juvenile at best, psychotic at worst. (I can’t help being this way, if that’s any defence at all. I promise I’ve tried.)

The Clasp, unlike Crosley’s essays, has received fairly solid, but not fawning, praise.

According to a Heller McAlpin at NPR, “This ‘Clasp’ Doesn’t Quite Hold Together”. The New York Times liked it, but not in a gushing way. That NYT review, by Julia Pierpont, starts with a line from Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” and goes on to call that story, “the inspiration for and central prop to Sloane Crosley’s first novel, a shrewd ­exploration of the modern-day late-quarter-life crisis, disguised as a ­caper.”

Is that what it is? I’m not so sure.

I liked this novel, though for the first twenty pages I thought I was going to hate it. The whole Guy de Maupassant hinge felt forced, pretentious. I hated it. And the thing is, the book is populated nearly entirely by hateful characters. Maybe Pierpont is just nicer than me. Maybe she has more pity for this quarter-life-crisis thing than I do. Maybe 10 years ago I would have been able to stand, or even like, these disgusting, spoiled, asshats. Not so much any more.

Just to clarify, I think Crosley’s characters are believable. Eminently so. They’re just hateable. They remind me, viscerally, of all the overprivileged assholes I went to college with. Tiresome, usually-white liberals who think they’re special.

I know as a young person, I craved the approval of those cloaked monsters.

It is only in recent years that I’ve realized the truth and started unfriending them en masse, but there just comes a point when you realize that you’ve had enough of the mansplaining, the whitesplaining, the liberalsplaining, the endless whining  (which I can’t stomach from people who’ve never suffered so much as a truly bad day). And for their part, these jerks likely realize around the same time that they never liked you much anyway, or at least not since you got so opinionated, or educated, or too big for your britches. They liked you better when you laughed awkwardly at their monkey jokes about your face, and brown-lady jokes about cleaning their apartments, before you lost your sense of humour.

I digress, but this is a real social drama I’ve watched play out. It’s one I’ve participated in. Recently.

Other parts of the text rang true as well.

One character is an overworked assistant to an overbearing, wackadoodle jewellery designer who makes chunky mid-range pieces out of broken milk glass and the like. The jewellery-making details feel real, likely because that’s a personal interest. (Crosley’s sister invented magnetic jewellery clasps, something she mentions in one of her previously-published essays.) And the overbearing, unfair, unreasonable boss of the jewellery industry character is believable too, to my mind, because she seems like a play on one of Crosley’s real-life employers, a woman caricatured in another early essay, “The Ursula Cookie”.

This is not to say that Crosley can’t make things up. While there is a through-line of believability in The Clasp, a lot of it is obvious fantasy. It’s a healthy, enjoyable pairing and one I think works.

If you Google the book, a few potential genres come up.

The Clasp is bizarrely categorized as humour, romance novel, humorous fiction, and romantic suspense, all at the same time.

Every one of these genre designations feels wrong. I suppose it’s because Crosley is still a relatively young woman, and the book features similarly youngish people (by literary standards) and there is a tiny bit of cis-het hooking up and relationship stuff in it. (Still, to call it a romance is beyond a stretch.)

It’s just an enjoyable novel.

The Clasp is not something I’d recommend in a desperate tone.

I wouldn’t say, for example, “You have to read this” with anything resembling vehemence, no matter how much I thought a person might like it. But I would recommend it. At least, to a certain type of friend. If you’re usually a reader of literary fiction, if you’re of a certain age (30s, basically), if you want something light-ish that isn’t too-light  – under the right circumstances, The Clasp may be for you. It’s not a beach-read, and it’s not a literary slog. It falls somewhere in between.

I see The Clasp as a contemporary novel of manners. It’s just that most people don’t seem to know what manners are anymore, including the characters in this book. Intriguing, yet relatable, right? You’ll see.

Sloan Crosley’s The Clasp was released October 6, 2015. More book reviews and such are here.