The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty
Amanda Filipacchi, 2015
W.W. Norton & Co.
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 978039335230#
Summary
In the heart of New York City, a group of artistic friends struggles with society's standards of beauty.
At the center are Barb and Lily, two women at opposite ends of the beauty spectrum, but with the same problem: each fears she will never find a love that can overcome her looks.
Barb, a stunningly beautiful costume designer, makes herself ugly in hopes of finding true love.
Meanwhile, her friend Lily, a brilliantly talented but plain-looking musician, goes to fantastic lengths to attract the man who has rejected her—with results that are as touching as they are transformative.
To complicate matters, Barb and Lily discover that they may have a murderer in their midst, that Barb’s calm disposition is more dangerously provocative than her beauty ever was, and that Lily's musical talents are more powerful than anyone could have imagined.
Part literary whodunit, part surrealist farce, The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a smart, modern-day fairy tale. With biting wit and offbeat charm, Amanda Filipacchi illuminates the labyrinthine relationship between beauty, desire, and identity, asking at every turn: what does it truly mean to allow oneself to be seen? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 10, 1967
• Where—Paris, France
• Education—B.A., Hamilton College; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Amanda Filipacchi (fila-paki) is an American novelist. She was born in Paris and educated in both France and the U.S. She is the author of four novels, Nude Men (1993), Vapor (1999), Love Creeps (2005), and The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (2015). Her fiction has been translated into 13 languages.
Filipacchi was born in Paris, and was educated in France (attending the American School of Paris in St. Cloud) and in the U.S. She is the daughter of former model Sondra Peterson and Daniel Filipacchi, chairman emeritus of Hachette Filipacchi Medias.
Filipacchi has been writing since the age of thirteen, completing three unpublished novels in her teenage years. She has lived in New York since she was 17. She attended Hamilton College, from which she graduated with a B.A. in Creative Writing. At age 20 she tried her hand at non-fiction writing at Rolling Stone magazine. Then in 1990 Filipacchi enrolled in Columbia University's M.F.A fiction writing program, where she wrote a master's thesis, which she later turned into her first published novel, Nude Men.
In 1992, even before graduating from Columbia, her agent, Melanie Jackson, sold Nude Men to Viking Press. Filipacchi was only 24. The novel was translated widely and was anthologized in The Best American Humor 1994 (Simon & Schuster).
Reviewers have called Filipacchi "a prodigious postfeminist talent" and a "lovely comic surrealist." The Boston Globe described her writing style as "reminiscent in certain ways of Muriel Spark ... brisk, witty, knowing, mischievous." Love Creeps, her third book, was included in the syllabus for a course on the comic novel in Columbia University's graduate creative writing program.
In the lead-up to the release of The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty, Bustle listed the novel as one the "12 of the Most Anticipated Books of 2015, aka the Titles We Can't Get Our Hands On Soon Enough." Huffington Post listed it as one of its "2015 Books We Can't Wait To Read." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/5/2016.)
Book Reviews
Funny, surreal, absurd and charmingly preposterous.
Sarah Lyall - New York Times Book Review
The funniest novelist you’ve never heard of.... Few comic novelists get characters talking so naturally, and amusingly.
John Freeman - Boston Globe
Readers who’d like to spend a little time at the corner where a brisker Haruki Murakami meets a drier ‘30 Rock’ would do well to seek out Filipacchi’s radiantly intelligent and very funny novel.
Ellis Avery - San Francisco Chronicle
Filipacchi's lively story reflects on the unearned power that beauty confers on its recipients...breezy with a bite.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR
Magic spills from the pores of Filipacchi’s story.... The resulting romp is a witty and honest rendering of the unknowable distance between perception and reality, exploring the possibility that beauty is literally in the eyes of the beholder.
Alexandra Coakley - Slate
A surreal and utterly compelling triumph.
Buzzfeed
[A] zanily satirical, spot-on novel.
Leigh Haber - Oprah Magazine
Takes a fairy tale, flips it on its head, and adds an element of murder . . . will both make you laugh and keep you on the edge of your seat.
Lynsey Eidell - Glamour
Filipacchi’s fourth novel blithely upends the social constructs of beauty, desire, and art in her signature brisk, darkly comic style.... Filipacchi succeeds by loading this frothy plot with sharp surreal turns and layers of subversive meaning.... [W]hile looks can kill, they’re no match for Filipacchi’s rapier wit.
Publishers Weekly
Filipacchi's absurdist fourth novel requires a reader who is willing to suspend disbelief, so let's accept the ridiculous premise and dive in.... While some of Filipacchi's gags stray into eye-rolling territory and her message about the role of beauty in our culture manages to be both heavy-handed and superficial, the novel has its moments. —Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD
Library Journal
(Starred review.) An astute, piercing look at the value society and individuals place on appearance… impossible to put down and utterly dead-on in its assessment of human nature.
Booklist
[A] little over-the-top.... Still, there's something weirdly compelling about the whole excessive parade, and most people will keep reading just to find out how all the elaborate manipulations turn out.... [A]n unsettling portrait of the way extreme physical beauty or ugliness distort people's impressions.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty, both Barb and Lily don disguises, of opposite kinds, to hide what they really look like and thereby attract the man of their dreams. Can we consider Barb and Lily as foils for one another in the novel? Are their troubles finally the same or different?
2. Barb, Georgia, and Lily are all artists. What kind of distinction does the novel make between physical beauty and artistic beauty? Which is more powerful? More important? Can one get in the way of the other? Can one serve the other? How?
3. Would you consider The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty to be a comedy of manners? A murder mystery? A modern fairy tale? Or all of the above? Why?
4. The novel presents us with two different forms of love: love between friends and romantic love. Which is more powerful? More important? What is the relationship between love and beauty in the novel?
5. Which scene in the novel did you find funniest? Why?
6. Would you argue that the love between Strad and Lily is real, even though it is based on a lie? Why or why not?
7. Do you trust that Peter would have fallen in love with Barb even if he had not known what she really looked like? Why or why not? Does it matter?
8. Penelope earns her living by convincing customers that they have broken her ugly clay pots. Of this line of work, Barb says she "wouldn’t be surprised if the art of deception became the true art of the piece." Do you agree with Barb that Penelope is a kind of artist in her own right? Why or why not? How does her form of beauty, and art-making, play into the themes established by Barb’s and Lily’s?
9. How does the background information that we get about Barb’s parents help us understand her relationship to her own beauty? Is it really Gabriel’s suicide that causes her to don her disguise, do you think, or had her mother’s story been troubling her as well?
10. How "happy" did you find the ending? How did it resolve Lily’s and Barb’s more existential problems with the nature of physical beauty and of romantic love?
11. How important has physical beauty been in the trajectory of your own life? Do you ever wish you could try on another face? What difference do you think it would make?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)