"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." --Michael Chabon, author of The Yiddish Policemen''s Union "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." --J. Courtney Sullivan, author of The Engagements " 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.
" --Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story "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.
" --Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock "Crosley is already an established humorist.and her signature wit is sharp as ever here. She is startlingly good at portraying comically awful characters who would seem cartoonish if they weren''t also so recognizable. Crosley is an incisive observer of human nature in general and of a generation in particular. For all its humor, Crosley''s prose is equally sharp in delineating her characters'' despair. When, late in the novel, Nathaniel finally says the words Kezia has always wanted to hear from him, she wishes she could "give the gift of him saying it to her younger self, the one who needed to hear it." All at once there is nothing funny, but something all too sad and true, in this highly comic, highly affecting novel." -- The New York Times Book Review "In her debut novel, The Clasp , Crosley''s talent for extracting hilarity from disappointment crosses over into fiction and thrives there.
Amid all the travel and high jinks, the true journey of this book is a philosophical one. The book''s delicious humor and whirlwind plot help the book''s harshest medicine -- important-but-sad epiphanies of life''s truths, both beautiful and cold -- taste far more enjoyable than it would if delivered by a less-funny writer. The amusing adage "If I have to learn something, I''d rather have fun doing it" fits The Clasp well: Its humor is wildly entertaining, but relevance always shows up at the party." -- The San Francisco Chronicle "Sloane Crosley graduates from delightful essayist to accomplished novelist in one giant step that she takes easily in The Clasp . The novel deepens even as the mood lightens. The madcap adventure is responsible for the latter, but it''s the profound connection that the lapsed friends rekindle that makes The Clasp a rich read." -- The New York Daily News "The newest--and arguably the funniest [tribute to "The Necklace"]--is Sloane Crosley''s The Clasp , a light-hearted but sincere novel about three college friends who reunite a decade after graduation and end up in a kind of soul-searching caper that takes them through New York, Los Angeles, Florida, and France. Crosley''s comedy is nearly always upbeat.
but it still manages to slyly investigate the downside of "personal authenticity," that weird American obsession that distorts everything from our shopping habits to our national politics. In The Clasp , characters struggle on the brink of 30 to transform the fake--meaning the privately miserable and "successful" lives they''ve been pretending to lead--into something real. Crosley has achieved a rare feat: a complex and clever work of homage that deepens the original by connecting it to contemporary life. The Clasp is a gentle, astute, funny, smart, and very entertaining book." -- The New Republic "The breezy New York essayist with a post-millennial undertow hasn''t radically altered her voice in transit to fiction. That''s good, because Crosley''s skittery wit and polished warmth make her first novel worthy of its meta-fictional basis, "The Necklace," Guy de Maupassant''s short story about the fraudulence of our fetish for authenticity. [a] luminous, ridiculous adventure, a caper in the French countryside that evokes both Amélie and The Pink Panther." -- New York Magazine "Wonderful and wacky.
Crosley''s a pundit of the absurd. Those who love [her] essays for the way they straddle the line between slapstick humor and essential truths will love her fiction too. Each sentence builds upon the last, toward one big wink: Isn''t life weird? And isn''t it great?" -- Elle Magazine " The Clasp , her debut novel, fairly bursts with [Crosley''s] trademark snappy patter. At the literary heart of the mystery is the famous story by French writer Guy de Maupassant, about a lost necklace that ruins a poor woman''s life. As students, Victor and Nathaniel were present when their French professor embarrassed everyone by breaking down as she explained the story''s meaning; Victor alone envied her passion. The glory of this novel lies in showing how passion--not passivity--can reawaken even the most jaded 30-year-olds." -- The Toronto Star "Crosley, with her quirky cleverness, seems more in league with the doohickeys of the world than with the emeralds. She''s interested not so much in transcendent beauty as in the small gears that hold people together and sometimes force them apart; when the objects you cherish could easily turn out to be fake, what matters is not what you cling to but the fact that you cling to it .
Crosley''s stylishness as a writer never tips over into shtickiness or stifles her warmth--it only makes the flowering of genuine emotion more powerful . Crosley deftly rewrites The Great Gatsby, another exploration of authenticity and falsehood in which youngish friends and lovers seek to recapture the past. But in her version, the green light--the dream--never appears: These characters don''t even know what they want. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that their desires are too diffuse to collapse into a single brilliant point on the horizon." -- Slate "A novel with more verve and imagination than much of the plot-light fare that typically gets the high-literary treatment, a story that shares at least some DNA with ambitious capers like Donna Tartt''s The Goldfinch and Marisha Pessl''s Special Topics in Calamity Physics . Fans of [Crosley''s] essays will be pleased to find that she''s just as funny and tenderly deprecating with her fictional characters as she is with herself." -- Vogue.com "A knockout.
" -- O Magazine "Her debut novel, The Clasp (FSG), is shot through with numerous inimitable Crosley-isms--wisecracking young sophisticates, trenchant yet occasionally perverse social observations, the errant (and unapologetic) pun. At its heart, though, it''s a treasure hunt. Playing off the melodrama and social critique of Guy de Maupassant''s classic 1884 short story "The Necklace," The Clasp pulls three college friends, now pushing 30 and each struggling with their own versions of existential disenchantment, along a journey of literal and figurative discovery." -- Interview Magazine "Sloane Crosley is one of the sharpest and funniest writers around." --Ryan Vlastelica, The A.V. Club Praise for I Was Told There''d Be Cake : "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." -- Elle Magazine "Sloane Crosley asserts herself as a new master of non-fiction situational comedy in I Was Told There''d Be Cake ." -- Entertainment Weekly "[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." --The Seattle Times "Sloane''s is a generous, sparkling hilarity.By the end of the book, the flirtation has worked, and you''re left desperate for more." -- Newsday "You''ll feel as though you''re sitting with her at a café, breathlessly waiting to hear wha.