Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace” features one of his most eloquent twists. An aspiring socialite borrows but mislays a precious diamond necklace and is reduced to penury by attempting to replace it. Only when she makes full restitution does she discover that the piece was a fake. The story has attracted plenty of admirers: Henry James reversed the premise for a tribute entitled “Paste”, in which presumed counterfeit gems are revealed to be genuine. Somerset Maugham based at least two stories, “Mr Know-All” and “A String of Beads”, on Maupassant’s model. Now, New York writer Sloane Crosley has created an exuberant homage of her own.
Crosley’s reputation rests on two collections of essays, How Did You Get This Number and I Was Told There’d Be Cake, whose wise-cracking prose and cosmopolitan style rest somewhere between David Sedaris’s quotidian wit and Candace Bushnell’s neurotic self-absorption. Her substantial debut novel marks a significant leap – as Crosley states on her website: “It’s one of the pleasures of essays, shutting a door and opening a new one, whereas one of the pleasures of a novel is opening the same door day after day.” It might be fairer to say that Crosley’s fictional style feels like hurtling down a long corridor rattling at all the doors in turn, and though some prove more enlightening than others it is invariably Maupassant who provides the key.
The Clasp introduces a trio of college friends approaching their 30th birthdays with varying degrees of dread. Victor has just been fired from his job as a data analyst for “the internet’s seventh-largest search-engine”. Screenwriter Nathaniel has been trying his luck in LA “with nothing but the Fitzgeraldian hope of weaving literary straw into Hollywood gold”. Kezia has exchanged a stuffy position in a prestigious jewellery firm for a funkier one in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district, promoting the wares of a designer who recycles smashed milk bottles and petrified rats’ teeth, but nonetheless finds that she misses “working with jewellery that had actual gemstones in it”.
Kezia has a pressing problem, as an overengineered necklace has developed a manufacturing fault due to the flimsiness of its magnetic clasp. She also seems to be the character most closely aligned to Crosley herself, who confesses in an essay entitled “The Height of Luxury” from her first collection: “I knew what a cabochon amethyst was before I could tie my shoes. Like a featherless magpie, I was obsessed with all things sparkly.” Intriguingly, the essay also reveals how her elder sister set an early course for a career in the jewellery trade: “My sister took the fixation one step further – she became one of the youngest patent holders in the United States when, at the age of 14, she invented magnetic jewellery clasps.”
Crosley’s knowledge of and delight in the more esoteric aspects of the jewellery world is the most rewarding aspect of the book. Particularly enjoyable is the sequence in which Kezia travels to Paris to confront the manufacturer of the malfunctioning clasp, which has been finished in an incredibly time-consuming form of enamelling known as cloisonné: “There were five factories in the world that made cloisonné jewellery and out of those five, four were on the same side of the same street in Paris and the fifth was on the opposite side.”
Just as insecure as the necklace, however, seems to be the chain of events that brings the other two main characters to France: Nathaniel because he has nothing better to do than pursue Kezia, and Victor because he becomes embroiled in a bizarre literary goose-chase that causes him to break into the turret of a Normandy chateau formerly occupied by Maupassant.
Ultimately, this rambling shaggy dog story bears as much resemblance to the cool, sparse perfection of Maupassant’s tale as Kezia’s kitsch baubles do to the Hope Diamond. Crosley tends to conceive conversations as a form of verbal sparring in which dialogue becomes repartee, and Kezia seemingly cannot summon an elevator without rehearsing ideas for future columns: “She thought of the crosswalk button at the airport. Was life merely what happened between buttons?”
Yet for anyone already hooked on Crosley’s borderline xenophobic but undeniably hilarious essays about young Americans adrift in Europe, there is plenty to enjoy, such as this tart response to a typical suburb: “Every few minutes there was a coiffeur, a tabac and an auto school. There were so many auto schools, Kezia couldn’t believe it. Maybe Parisians knew they were bad drivers. Maybe the problem was being addressed on a national level.” There is barely a page of the novel that doesn’t glitter with some similar nugget of wit or wisdom. But for all the prodigious entertainment it affords, The Clasp never quite adds up to more than the sum of its pearls.
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