The Clasp
Sloane Crosley, 2015
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374124410
Summary
Part comedy of manners, part treasure hunt, the first novel from the writer whom David Sedaris calls "perfectly, relentlessly funny."
Kezia, Nathaniel, and Victor are reunited for the extravagant wedding of a college friend. Now at the tail end of their twenties, they arrive completely absorbed in their own lives—Kezia the second-in-command to a madwoman jewelry designer in Manhattan; Nathaniel the former literary cool kid, selling his wares in Hollywood; and the Eeyore-esque Victor, just fired from a middling search engine.
They soon slip back into old roles: Victor loves Kezia. Kezia loves Nathaniel. Nathaniel loves Nathaniel.
In the midst of all this semi-merriment, Victor passes out in the mother of the groom's bedroom. He wakes to her jovially slapping him across the face. Instead of a scolding, she offers Victor a story she's never even told her son, about a valuable necklace that disappeared during the Nazi occupation of France.
And so a madcap adventure is set into motion, one that leads Victor, Kezia, and Nathaniel from Miami to New York and L.A. to Paris and across France, until they converge at the estate of Guy de Maupassant, author of the classic short story "The Necklace."
Heartfelt, suspenseful, and told with Sloane Crosley's inimitable spark and wit, The Clasp is a story of friends struggling to fit together now that their lives haven't gone as planned, of how to separate the real from the fake.
Such a task might be possible when it comes to precious stones, but is far more difficult to pull off with humans. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 3, 1978
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., Connecticut College
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Sloane Crosley is an essay and fiction writer living in New York. She has worked as a publicist at the Vintage Books division of Random House and as an adjunct professor in Columbia University’s Master of Fine Arts program. She graduated from Connecticut College in 2000.
Career
Crosley's collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, became a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for The Thurber Prize, one of Amazon.com's best books of the year and optioned for series by HBO.
Her second essay collection, How Did You Get This Number (2010) also became a New York Times bestseller, and her e-book, Up The Down Volcano (2011), became a #1 Amazon Kindle bestseller.
The Clasp (2015), Crosley's debut novel, received high marks from the New York Times, as well as from Vogue, Elle, Time, and People.
Crosley was a has also been a weekly columnist for The Independent in the UK and editor of The Best American Travel Writing 2011. Her essays have appeared in 2011's The Best American Nonrequired Reading and The Library of America's The 50 Funniest American Writers According to Andy Borowitz.
She was the founding columnist for the New York Times "Townies" Op-Ed series, a columnist for the New York Observer Diary, a columnist for the Village Voice, a contributing editor at BlackBook Magazine, and she continues to be a regular contributor to the New York Times, GQ, Elle and NPR.
Crosley has also written cover stories and features for Salon, Spin, Bon Appetit, Vogue, Esquire, Playboy, W Magazine and AFAR.
Other
Crosley is co-chair of The New York Public Library's Young Lions Committee and serves on the board of Housingworks Bookstore.
Crosley is also a model for eyeglass company Warby Parker. In 2012, she appeared on the TV series Gossip Girl as herself and she was a regular fixture on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/3/2016.)
Book Reviews
[A] shrewd exploration of the modern-day late-quarter-life crisis, disguised as a caper…[Crosley's] signature wit is sharp as ever here. She is startlingly good at portraying comically awful characters who would seem cartoonish if they weren't also so recognizable…Crosley is an incisive observer of human nature in general and of a generation in particular—people circling the age of 30 who foster undue fondness for the retro culture of their youth…For all its humor, Crosley's prose is equally sharp in delineating her characters' despair…in this highly comic, highly affecting novel.
Julia Pierpont - New York Times Book Review
[The Clasp is] a love-triangle-comedy-of-manners told in Crosley’s signature irreverent style.
Washington Post
Crosley has achieved a rare feat: a complex and clever work of homage that deepens the original by connecting it to contemporary life. The Clasp is a gentle, astute, funny, smart, and very entertaining book.
Julia Holme - New Republic
Crosley is best known for her comic essays, some of which were collected in I Was Told There’d Be Cake, but her gifts–keen observation, mordant humor, an affinity for the bittersweet–translate surprisingly seamlessly into fiction.
Lev Grossman - Time
Crosley, with her quirky cleverness, seems more in league with the doohickeys of the world than with the emeralds. She’s interested not so much in transcendent beauty as in the small gears that hold people together and sometimes force them apart; when the objects you cherish could easily turn out to be fake, what matters is not what you cling to but the fact that you cling to it.... Crosley’s stylishness as a writer never tips over into shtickiness or stifles her warmth—it only makes the flowering of genuine emotion more powerful .
Katy Waldman - Slate
A novel with more verve and imagination than much of the plot-light fare that typically gets the high-literary treatment, a story that shares at least some DNA with ambitious capers like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
Vogue
Those who love Crosley's essays for the way they straddle the line between slapstick humor and essential truths will love her fiction too. Each sentence builds upon the last, toward one big wink: Isn't life weird? And isn't that great?
Elle
With mordant wit and an ear for millennial patois, Crosley dissects the pretensions of Los Angeles and New York, then sends her characters to France on a madcap adventure. It's fun to tag along.
People
[A] mix of smarts and sarcasm to commemorate some of life’s more mortifying moment.... Victor’s harebrained attempts at tracking the necklace down, culminating in a French chateau break-in with a mildly concerned Kezia and Nathaniel in hot pursuit, make not only for fun reading but hint at the surprisingly poignant extent of just how far old acquaintances will go to save one another’s hides.
Publishers Weekly
This is not Crosley's first book;.... But it is her first novel. While attending a college friend's splashy wedding, twentysomethings...learn about a valuable necklace that vanished in Nazi-occupied France, and they're off on a crazy chase that leads them to the estate of Guy de Maupassant, beloved for his classic short story "The Necklace."
Library Journal
Crosley is an innate storyteller and writes with her signature wit and flair.... The Clasp speaks to flaws in humanity and friendships in a charming and realistic way. This novel entertains even as it provokes internal examination of one’s own relationships.
BookPage
Crosley, of the smart, humorous essay collections I Was Told There'd Be Cake (2008) and How Did You Get This Number? (2010) writes her three-dimensional characters' thoughts and dialogue with a clever crispness her fans would hope for, and she further stuns with a mastery of her first novel's setting and frame: a lavish Florida wedding, a crotchety Parisian jewelry designer's offices, a drive through enchanting-and disturbing-provincial France.
Booklist
[A] quest to find a priceless necklace and regain an even rarer treasure: a genuine connection. [T]renchant.... [A]n interconnected circle of friends from college who, like beads on a broken necklace, have dispersed and rolled off on different paths.... [S]mart, sardonic, sometimes-zany, yet also sensitive.... A real gem.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
2. What first impressions did you get of Kezia, Victor, and Nathaniel as they gathered in Florida for the wedding? As the scenes shifted in points of view, who were you rooting for the most?
3. In chapter seven, Victor and Nathaniel’s English professor delivers her passionate rendering of "The Necklace." How would you have responded to her request for a one-word summary of the story? Do any of the characters in The Clasp share traits with Mathilde Loisel, the woman who loses the borrowed necklace in Maupassant’s story?
4. Johanna tells Victor that she doesn’t want Felix to know about the necklace because "he’s very sensitive about anything having to do with Nazi heritage" and because it might not still be where the soldier hid it. Do you think it’s that simple, or was Johanna up to something else when she decided to entrust a stranger with her secret?
5. What were your theories about the drawing? What results did you predict for the treasure hunt? Make a virtual visit to Chateau Miromesnil (www.chateaumiromesnil.com) and imagine what other hidden surprises such a place could hold.
6. What does The Clasp say about the nature of friendship? What has kept Victor, Nathaniel, and Kezia from achieving success in their careers as they approach age thirty? What do you predict for the next decade of their lives?
7. Johanna tells Victor that jewelry is "a blank canvas that gets filled by the person who wears it." Is there a piece of jewelry in your life that has special significance for you? Do you care whether jewelry is made from precious gems, or is all jewelry "real" in your eyes? Would you value fake jewelry inspired by fictional stories?
8. Discuss the idea of a clasp, which is meant to provide security. What does Claude teach Kezia about the practical aspects of his craft? What do all of the characters discover about weak links and ways of strengthening them?
9. If you had been Victor, would you have been able to hide the truth?
10. What took Nathaniel and Kezia so long to acknowledge their attraction to each other? What makes them simultaneously an unlikely couple and a great match? How are they different from Caroline and Felix, and Grey and Paul?
11. In the closing scene, on the flight home, have the characters been transformed, or are they simply able to be themselves at last?
12. As you read about the life of Guy de Maupassant, how did you react? Why don’t short stories have as much mainstream cultural impact as they did in the nineteenth century? Are writers like Nathaniel (pitching shows like The Pretenders to executives like Lauren) our modern-day Maupassants?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
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