The Clasp by Sloane Crosley

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 6, 2015

The Clasp is the kind of novel that reunites a bunch of old friends who show up for a special occasion. In some novels that occasion is a reunion or a funeral. In The Clasp, it is a wedding. That event is the jumping off point for the story, although it takes some time before the plot leaps forward. When it does, it involves jewelry, Guy de Maupassant, and an odd love triangle.

Victor Wexler has been fired (with good reason) from the company that operates the seventh-largest Google competitor (the one nobody uses). His college friend Kezia Morton, who rejected his college advances, now works for a jewelry designer, Rachel, whose jewelry is getting a lot of buzz that might soon turn negative since the latest batch has defective clasps. A third college friend, Nathaniel, writes for television when he is lucky enough to get hired, giving Sloane Crosley a chance to lampoon the plasticity of Hollywood, an admittedly easy target.

Since they are at a wedding, Victor and Kezia follow the tradition of hooking up with random sex partners. After the wedding, Victor’s hookup’s jewelry becomes the focal point of his life. Following comic logic, Victor goes to France on a quest involving Guy du Maupassant and, yes, a necklace. Nathaniel and Kezia also happen to be in Paris, giving Crosley a chance to make sport of the French, another easy target although perhaps a less inviting one in light of recent events.

None of the characters quite know how they feel about each other. Nathaniel, in particular, has ambivalent feelings about Kezia, who (as he sees it) swoops into his life every few months for the purpose of making him feel bad about himself. Nathaniel and Kezia are in each other’s company for most of the novel (as Victor pursues his quest), giving their relationship a chance to come into focus.

The Clasp is an assemblage of amusing moments. They occur at parties, in classrooms (I particularly enjoyed a professor who projected her woeful self into the character of the wife in “The Necklace”), in restaurants, and in the workplace. I kept reading because I enjoyed the amusing moments and the clever phrases, but I also kept wondering what the point was of a plot that seemed forced. It works as a vehicle to give the characters opportunities to make snarky observations about their respective worlds, but it doesn’t work as an actual story. Victor's quest is too silly to be credible, which shouldn't be a problem in a comedy, but Crosley's attempt to play that part of the story straight falls flat.

There are inevitably parallels between this story and “The Necklace,” but they seem thin and stretched. Still, the story’s value lies not in deep meaning but in insightful and funny observations of characters who can’t quite get over their pasts or move on with their futures.

RECOMMENDED