Amazon.com Review
Gigi Levangie Grazer has written one previous novel (
Rescue Me), helped pen the screenplay for
Stepmom, and, not least, is married to Hollywood uber-producer Brian Grazer (he of the wacky hair and the not-so-wacky partnership with Ron Howard). At first glance, Mrs. Grazer appears to be a complete parvenu as a novelist.
Maneater rips off every girl-power/shopaholic source from early Tama Janowitz right up to
Sex and the City. Her prose can be ungrammatical, her plot hopelessly predictable, and her characters paper-thin. But Grazer has a secret weapon: her preternaturally acid powers of observation. When she writes about the freaky mores of Hollywood, the book exerts an irresistible pull. Thirtyish LA It girl Clarissa Alpert reflects on her shallow, jobless, mateless (but fabulous!) life, and decides it's high time she was married. She and her four best friends (hello, Sarah Jessica Parker and company) hatch a plan to snag the cutest, hottest young producer in town. What ensues is hardly new territory, but the book is enlivened by Grazer's amazing ability to nail down pop culture ephemera. To wit: "Clarissa was sentimental--she liked saving messages from old friends and C-level celebrities. She had an answering tape collection that dated all the way back to babydoll dresses, sparkle dust and Hole." Her eye for detail--and her refusal ever to make Clarissa lovable, or even likable--make
Maneater a hypnotic read. This is fiction-as-gigantic-chocolate-bar. Halfway through, you feel a little off color, but there's no way you're going to stop.
--Claire Dederer
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Masquerading as chick lit, this pitch-black comedy by Grazer (Rescue Me) is actually a scathing satire of L.A. society (to use the term loosely). Clarissa Alpert is 31-admitting-to-28, wears only Gucci and Prada, greets friend and foe alike with "a triple-cheek air kiss" and "had slept her way, without mercy, regret, mourning or conscience, through Greater Los Angeles." Her four best friends, less clever than she but equally venal, agree that Clarissa is the valedictorian of men. Among them, love is rare, but sex is plentiful and organized into a precise taxonomy that includes the "Curiosity Fuck," the "Boredom Fuck" and more. But lately Clarissa has decided that it's time to get married. Fortuitously, film-school grad and would-be producer Aaron Mason appears in her life. He's wearing cowboy boots (ugh), but driving a Bentley (her favorite car to be seen in); he's a foreigner (anyone born between California and New York is foreign), but the heir to a department store fortune. After her first sighting of him, Clarissa reserves the hotel and the florist and selects her Vera Wang wedding gown. Her divorced parents-amiable, chick-chasing father and "brittle-boned, anorexic, four-pack-a-day smoker Jewish mother"-bring their own demented enthusiasms to the matrimonial pursuit. In due course, the fanciest wedding of the season takes place despite the bride's refusal to sign a pre-nup. But this is only one-third of the way through the book, and as you might imagine, Clarissa doesn't quite live happily ever after. A true antiheroine, Clarissa, like the rest of the cast, is unapologetically loathsome. In lesser hands she would be merely irritating, but Grazer gives Clarissa just enough intelligence and spark to make her shameless antics deliciously entertaining.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
