Review of SOCIAL CREATURE by Tara Isabella Burton

2.5 Stars

Louise Wilson is an aspiring writer working multiple jobs to make ends meet.  She encounters socialite Lavinia Williams and quickly gets drawn into her aimless, extravagant lifestyle.  Louise gains entry to New York’s literary world through Lavinia; they spend their time attending exclusive, decadent parties and curating their lives on social media.  Louise is not always happy with Lavinia’s controlling treatment of her, but she keeps her feelings to herself for fear of losing Lavinia’s patronage.

Much of the interest in the book lies in wanting to learn how this toxic friendship will end because it is inevitable that it will not end well; we learn that Lavinia befriends people whom she can manipulate and then discards them about six months later; when Louise has known Lavinia for about six months, she is told not to panic yet, “’But if I were you – I’d have a backup plan.’”  In the first chapter, the reader is even told that “six months from now, Lavinia dies” and “Louise . . . will be there.”

There are no likeable characters.  Lavinia is needy and manipulative.  She draws insecure people into her circle and then uses their fear of rejection to manipulate them until she gets bored and casts them aside:  “’She made you feel so special.  Until she didn’t.’”  She has no understanding of the real world; for example, she lives in a rent-free apartment owned by her parents and has a generous allowance.  She is lazy but has pretentions of being an intellectual.  The people with whom she associates are similarly shallow, vapid, and narcissistic.  Louise is also self-absorbed and desperately needy.   She wants to be as blonde, thin, rich, and confident as Lavinia.  The excessive drinking and the outrageous, hedonistic parties actually appeal to her?!  She knows that Lavinia is manipulating her, but she lets her continue.  Her choice in men is questionable.  I found it difficult to care about what happened to these people.

The book satirizes society’s obsession with social media.  Everyone Lavinia knows is obsessed with idealized constructions of their lives online; they are constantly uploading photos and checking for the number of “likes” they receive.  Activity on social media is viewed as the equivalent of in-person interaction.  This view allows for dangerous manipulation of reality after Lavinia’s death.

The book is narrated in the present tense via an omniscient third-person narrator.  What bothered me are the intrusive comments addressing the reader directly:  “Lavinia will never go.  She is going to die soon.  You know this” and “You and I both know what happens now:  Lavinia doesn’t make it.  But the thing you have to understand is:  why.  Now you and I, we’ve been to parties before” and “You and I, of course, we know the truth.” 

At one point, Louise criticizes Lavinia’s writing style:  “the prose is too purple and the sentences are too long and the literary allusions are too forced and every other line is a quotation or a character monologuing about the nature of Life and Art.”  Many of those criticisms could be made about the novelist’s style:  sentences tend to be overly long or sentence fragments; there are allusions to the writings of Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, and Hemingway and characters have pretentious literary names such as Cordelia, Beowulf, Rex Eliot, and Rosekranz; and discussions at the parties invariably include Hal Upchurch speaking about “The Great Man of American Letters.”

Perhaps I’m not the intended audience for this book.  There is little in it that appeals to me: the plot is repetitive, the characters are obnoxious and unsympathetic, and the writing style is grating.