Fictional Role Models

Fictional Role Models: Clarissa Alpert

I have a confession to make.  I love to read, I really do.  One of my happiest past times is curling up in bed with a huge mug of earl grey and a brand new book ready to whisk me off onto a magical journey and allow myself to forget my own life for a few hours.  Sometimes a book comes along that is so brilliant that I can literally pick it up and read from any point.  Maneater by Gigi Levine is one of those rare books.  I first read this book on a family holiday in Kalkan and it served as a perfect accompaniment to my sun lounger.

From Publishers Weekly:

Masquerading as chick lit, this pitch-black comedy by Grazer (Rescue Me) is actually a scathing satire of L.A. society (to use the term loosely). Clarissa Alpert is 31-admitting-to-28, wears only Gucci and Prada, greets friend and foe alike with "a triple-cheek air kiss" and "had slept her way, without mercy, regret, mourning or conscience, through Greater Los Angeles." But lately Clarissa has decided that it's time to get married. Fortuitously, film-school grad and would-be producer Aaron Mason appears in her life. He's wearing cowboy boots (ugh), but driving a Bentley (her favorite car to be seen in); he's a foreigner (anyone born between California and New York is foreign), but the heir to a department store fortune. After her first sighting of him, Clarissa reserves the hotel and the florist and selects her Vera Wang wedding gown. Her divorced parents-amiable, chick-chasing father and "brittle-boned, anorexic, four-pack-a-day smoker Jewish mother"-bring their own demented enthusiasms to the matrimonial pursuit. In due course, the fanciest wedding of the season takes place despite the bride's refusal to sign a pre-nup. But this is only one-third of the way through the book, and as you might imagine, Clarissa doesn't quite live happily ever after. A true antiheroine, Clarissa, like the rest of the cast, is unapologetically loathsome. In lesser hands she would be merely irritating, but Grazer gives Clarissa just enough intelligence and spark to make her shameless antics deliciously entertaining. 

Probably one of the least likeable characters in popular fiction that I can recall ever reading about.  She lies and cheats her way through life without chipping and immaculately manicured finger nail but by the end of the book you kind of love her for it. She has been brought up in a world where we are constantly told we can “have it all” and then some, and shouldn’t we be allowed to have it all.  The author doesn’t end the book with Clarissa becoming some reformed character and I think that is why I love this book so much.  While this was never going to be a book that changed the world it doesn’t set out to be.  The perfect book to read when the weather is particularly bad outside and you fancy a bit of turn your brain of fiction.