Big Apple bites
Two very different takes on New York, social media and female friendship.
Tara Isabella Burton describes herself as a “raconteuse of bizarre tales, clamberer over ruins”. In more concrete terms, she is an accomplished journalist and doctor of theology living in New York, and now a highly successful debut novelist.
Social Creature is the story of two young women wrapped up in each other in New York City. It’s about social insecurity, social climbing, social media. And it’s not that bizarre – it is a psychological thriller, after all, so readers will be braced for things to escalate insanely fast.
First, we get to know Louise. Her life is ruled by explicit metrics: the money in her bank account, the hours it takes to commute between various dead-end jobs, her weight. A controlling, abusive ex lurks in her past.
Via a whirlwind friendship with Lavinia, Louise once again loses grip on her life. Lavinia is gorgeous and Gatsbyesque, into burlesque. She has drugs and frocks and a fancy apartment, and her parents are out of town. She will die soon, we’re told early on.
A tragedy, then – and Instagram and
Facebook provide the stage. Posts and shares and so on drive much of the narrative, and create a convenient, glamorous playground for subterfuge and big reveals.
All very clever and naturally done but art, unfortunately, does imitate life: I felt the reliance on social media at times set up a numbing distance between reader and story. Maybe I’m just being old-fashioned? Other reviewers say they were consumed by it.
Radiant Shimmering Light takes very similar elements – New York, female friendship and insecurity, social media – and pushes them all through the prism of the wellness industry, throwing out rainbows and auras and turmeric lattes.
In contrast with Burton’s grimy, striving city, Sarah Selecky’s New York is a gentle land of clarity. “The whole city glows in afternoon light as if it’s caught in a jar of apricot jelly,” she writes.
It’s a lovely place to spend time, especially as we’re looking through the rather special eyes of Lilian Quick.
Lilian sees auras around animals, and paints them. She lives alone and quite profoundly self-absorbed in Toronto – until her remarkable cousin comes calling. The girl Lilian once knew as Florence is now Eleven, a wellness guru with a shock of glorious hair, an electric way with words and hordes of wealthy devotees.
Lilian, entranced, moves to New York to help Eleven build her empire. She’s also seeking her own enlightenment. And she finds it, in a real, roundabout sort of way.
Selecky’s great strength is her tone. This is a book littered with kombucha, chakras and chia puddings, where women call one another “flowers” and say things like “everything you see that sparkles is a reflection of yourself”.
It would’ve been easy to overtly take the piss. But Selecky doesn’t need to. Instead, she sits quietly and observes, letting all that commodified spirituality satirise itself.