joandidionscorvette's review against another edition
Have you ever been reading a book and a character does something that makes so little sense to you that you think you had to have skipped some pages or read something incorrectly? This happened about 200 pages in and I believe this is the catalyst for the actual active plot of the story, but it left me so confused that I couldn’t continue. I just fundamentally didn’t understand the motivations or why it was happening the way it was. I was fine with this book in the beginning when it was laying out the characters and their dynamic that they’ve all had since college. Nobody really grabbed me character-wise, but I thought maybe they’d evolve. But when the whole story hinges on a character’s decision that makes little to no sense to me, I can’t see a reason to keep going.
Spoiler
Why did Victor lie about knowing where the jewelry was? He didn’t steal anything or do anything wrong, the family just wants to know where it was being kept. Why bother lying? Maybe it’s class anxiety and he thinks they’re accusing him of stealing because they’re filthy rich? But that didn’t track for me based on the dialogue. Is he that paranoid, or even that self involved, that he couldn’t just let the family know where the mother’s jewelry was hidden? It seems like he perceives the situation wildly inaccurately. It was just confusing.kecordell's review against another edition
3.0
"Was there a worse compliment than the one with no adjective? You have a face. It's a sweater. He does a job." p.28
"He was easily dissuaded from plans. He would force himself to write a few 'you out tonight?' texts and if he didn't hear back before 10 PM, that was that. He was in for the night. And yet, as much as he hated leaving the house, he also refused to have people over. Here was Victor's suddenly sacred space where so many hours were spent alone" p. 30
"I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing" - Guy de Maupassant
"He was easily dissuaded from plans. He would force himself to write a few 'you out tonight?' texts and if he didn't hear back before 10 PM, that was that. He was in for the night. And yet, as much as he hated leaving the house, he also refused to have people over. Here was Victor's suddenly sacred space where so many hours were spent alone" p. 30
"I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing" - Guy de Maupassant
snowbenton's review against another edition
1.0
Nathaniel is an LA-living wannabe comedy writer whom Crosley paints as lovable despite his utter lack of redeeming qualities, Keziah is a NYC-living designer's assistant who spends so much time inspecting other people's lives that she is incapable of realizing how much she hates her own, and Victor is a mentally ill unemployed man who goes to Paris to find a necklace that a dying old woman told him a story about. This seems designed to be a tongue-in-chic portrayal of three former college friends who meet up at another college friend's wedding and end up having a French adventure that reignites their lopsided friendship triangle -- but in actuality it is an insipid faux-intellectual melodrama whose barely realistic scenes are matched only by its paper thin caricatures-- I mean, characters. Wait, no, I didn't.
nukie19's review against another edition
3.0
Three stars for a book that is not bad. I didn't really like any of the characters nor find them very inspiring. They were a bit boring and the story just really didn't seem to go anywhere for me.
annalew's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted to love this book. I really did. I'm a sucker for a reunion story and this is a reunion story for the most part. A bunch of characters who went to college together reunite at a wedding and what happens at the wedding sets off a chain of events that leads them to France to look for a necklace. But this just didn't gel together for me. I didn't understand what was motivating the character of Victor to do what he was doing. There were a bunch of minor characters from college and I couldn't figure out why they existed at all. It was very well written and enjoyable enough that I wanted to keep going and find out how it ended but I didn't love it.
nicki_j's review against another edition
3.0
Underwhelming. I did not feel invested in the minor mystery or the characters, which were more like caricatures until the last few chapters. 2.75 stars.
meredithw20's review against another edition
4.0
This was my first experience with Sloane Crosley, though I reserved her memoir at the library before I reserved The Clasp... but I guess the length of those respective lines is telling? I dunno. I liked this book, despite stated objections to many of its elements in the abstract -- like I sort of roll my eyes when a work of modern fiction is presided over by the characters' obsession/intersection with a classic author, the way Whitman holds court in Paper Towns, but for whatever reason the Maupassant thing read as charming. I don't like stories where men have conflicting attractions to one woman (and I guess that's still true of The Clasp, because I didn't dig the way this ends). I am really done with mopey techie boys as book characters, but I followed Victor across the ocean. I was compelled to read this pretty quickly, despite a relatively low-stakes plot and characters I found irritating, I guess because their motivations had such a strange twist in application? Or because I liked the language so much? God, I have never written this long a Goodreads review. tl;dr: I don't know why I liked this book so much. Maybe you can tell me.
mary_clark's review against another edition
1.0
I wanted to like this book, but I'm not a fan of dialect. In this case, upper-class millennial dialect that prevented me from liking or caring about what happened to any of the characters.
aobrien23's review against another edition
3.0
I adore Sloane Crosley's non-fiction (and I might slightly want to be her), but this didn't have the same verve.