Reviews
Sloane Crosley asserts herself as a new master of non-fiction situational comedy in I Was Told There'd Be Cake ., Sloane Crosley's first novel is a smart comedy of errors . . . Taking a page from her essay collections ( I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number ), Crosley once again brandishes a mix of smarts and sarcasm to commemorate some of life's more mortifying moments in her first work of fiction...[It] makes not only for fun reading but hints at the surprisingly poignant extent of just how far old acquaintances will go to save one another's hides., Crosley responds to everyday absurdities with self-deprecation and an arsenal of metaphors, applying insights like a salve....As she expounds on her various mishaps and anxieties, it all manages to seem like proof that even when she's lost, she knows what she's doing all along., 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. A great recommendation for NA readers, too., Sloane's is a generous, sparkling hilarity...By the end of the book, the flirtation has worked, and you're left desperate for more., Although the stories are set in New York, Crosley's plights are universally relatable and described in a voice that's supremely witty and genuine., What puts Crosley over is her preternatural ability to slip into her offbeat interior world-and cajole us into going there too., I opened The Clasp and immediately realized that I'd been waiting far too long for Sloane Crosley to write a novel. Crosley is a literary addiction. There is no substitute. She is curious. She is smart. She is hilarious and edgy and generous and impossible to stop reading. Moreover, she misses nothing. Her attention to the seemingly smallest details-material, social, psychological-reveals, as the pages turn, an intricately tooled world that is as familiar as it is dazzling and new., I took so much pleasure in every sentence of The Clasp , fell so completely under the spell of its narrative tone-equal parts bite and tenderness, a dash of rue-and became so caught up in the charmingly dented protagonists and their off-kilter caper that the book's emotional power, building steadily and quietly, caught me off guard, and left me with a lump in my throat., Crosley has been honing her craft since we've seen her last, and the hard work shows. Now, she has mastered the precision of novelistic scene-setting deployed by our greatest practitioners of the American sentimental essay, writers such as Gopnik, Sedaris and, yes, even Thurber., Now that she's updated the role of ingenue by concocting a bracing cocktail of credulity and crankiness, [she has you wondering] what she might be able to do with a novel., In the battle for space on my family-room bookshelf, Sloane Crosley's "How Did You Get This Number" just pushed David Sedaris to the second-floor stacks....Where "Cake" played strictly for laughs, Crosley finds more balance here - she never slips into parody, and she knows how to keep the mood buoyed, even in moments with pathos., Crosley is like a tap-dancer, lighthearted and showmanlike...but capable of surprising you with the reserves of emotion and keen social observation., Praise for Sloane Crosley "Hilarious." -Los Angeles Times "Charming." - The New York Times Book Review "An exciting new talent." - San Francisco Chronicle "Now that she's updated the role of ingenue by concocting a bracing cocktail of credulity and crankiness, [she has you wondering] what she might be able to do with a novel." -Elle, With piquant prose, Crosley brings bite to reminiscences of a comfortable childhood in suburban White Plains, N.Y., and her salad days in Manhattan...[she's] that smart, sardonic friend who homes in on the ridiculous aspects of any situation and amplifies them to maximum hilarity., [Crosley] is ironic, droll and self-pillorying and, like Sedaris, she manages to balance passages that are laugh-out-loud funny with others that are both touching and resonant. Above all Crosley manages, Midas-like, to take the minutiae of her life - and all of our lives - and turn it into gold., Sloane Crosley's debut novel is hilarious, insightful, and full of characters and situations that only Sloane Crosley could devise. The laugh-out-loud observations and dialogue that make her essays such a delight to read shine through in her fiction too. The Clasp is a gem., This debut novel from a bestselling essayist follows an interlinked circle of friends on a quest to find a priceless necklace and regain an even rarer treasure: a genuine connection. This trenchant first novel from the author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake (2008) and How Did You Get This Number (2010) is about a necklace; Guy de Maupassant's classic short story, 'The Necklace'; and an interconnected circle of friends from college who, like beads on a broken necklace, have dispersed and rolled off on different paths . . . [A] smart, sardonic, sometimes-zany, yet also sensitive story. . . A real gem., Crosley's book [is] a welcome departure from the increasingly tired genre of first-person prose as stand-up comedy. Unlike David Sedaris ( I went to Anne Frank's house and all I got was real-estate lust! ) and other hugely successful practitioners, Crosley forces herself up against not her exquisite selfishness but some ideal she's grasping for-female camaraderie, neighborliness, sanity. She's also got a sharp fizzily old-fashioned sense of the madcap that, in the best pieces, has you thinking that she's figured out how to cross Mary Tyler Moore with Kingsley Amis-as well as wondering, now that she's updates the role of ingénue by concocting a bracing cocktail of credulity and crankiness, what she might be able to do with a novel., The Clasp reads like The Goonies written by Lorrie Moore. A touching but never sentimental portrait of a trio of quasi-adults turning into adult adults, this is one of those rare deeply literary books that also features-a plot! From the shores of Florida to the coast of Normandy, wonderful, unforgettable things happen in this enormously hilarious novel. And they are written in a language so beautiful, I gnashed my teeth at Sloane Crosley's talent., You'll feel as though you're sitting with her at a café, breathlessly waiting to hear what she's going to tell you next., Crosley is engaging and energetic...She is a fountain of observations, apt metaphors, and escalating wit.
