Amazon.com Review
A spare, druggy novel of manners written by a precocious, reportedly druggy undergraduate: ring any bells? With her first novel,
Normal Girl, Molly Jong-Fast may not owe a debt to society, but she certainly owes one to Bret Easton Ellis. Her heroine is Miranda Woke, child of a socialite mother who's "thin, in that willowy, dehydrated way that all socialites are thin" and an absentee father--"a short, fat, balding Jewish man who's rich, rich, rich, and famous, famous, famous." If her parental descriptors seem a little surface-y, well, that's Miranda, a girl whose A-list life consists of working in a gallery, going to parties, and consuming all the coke and heroin she can get her mitts on.
The book's rather sketchy plot opens with Miranda attending the funeral of her addict boyfriend. In chatty prose that clips right along, we follow her through a series of parties, dinners, and lots and lots of trips to the bathroom. As often as not, she ends the evening flat on her back: "Dosage has never been my forte." The gallery sinecure sees very little page time; it's mostly an excuse for Miranda to attend art-world parties and be snide. (The weakest parts of the novel come when Jong-Fast tries her hand at roman à clef: referring to Julian Schnabel as "Schnozzle" just doesn't give the required frisson.)
But life isn't all dry cleaning and speedballs; things are starting to fall apart for this party girl. "The loneliness," she says, "may kill me before the drugs ever have their chance." Miranda winds up in Hazelden, where she rehabs wittily and successfully. Jong-Fast, with the earnest vigor of the 20-year-old she was when she wrote Normal Girl, seems to buy the recovery line utterly. Maybe that's because she, the druggy daughter of a famous parent, has said in interviews that she's been down just the same road as Miranda. She's told her story with a modicum of grace; perhaps her future novels will actually be good. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
"I leave the temple feeling empty," says Miranda Woke, the protagonist and first-person narrator of Jong-Fast's debut novel, as she exits the funeral of her drug addicted boyfriend. "The texture of the morning felt more like Oreo filler than anything remotely satisfying." The same could be said of the novel itself. Jong-Fast, the 21-year-old daughter of writers Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast (and granddaughter of octogenarian novelist Howard Fast) has written an uneven chronicle of the downward spiraling life (and shaky beginnings of recovery) of 19-year-old Miranda, addicted to cocaine, Valium and heroin, who is the daughter of Diana, a New York socialite, and architect Jason Woke, "the Frank Lloyd Wright of his generation." Poor little rich girl Miranda is sometimes amusing as she discusses the foibles of what she calls the MAM (Madison Avenue Mafia), which she says "operates under one of the basic principles of Zen Buddhism: mindfulness. They may not be mindful of you or me but they make up for it with a self-obsession so blinding that the sun looks tame." But more often than not her attempts at cuteness are glib and forced, as when she lists guests at an important opening of one of her father's buildings as "Partha Dewart, decorator to the stars, and Pawn Snuffy Bones, the rap star." Though her rampages can be entertaining, self-pitying Miranda makes it difficult for readers to empathize with her as she struggles to come to terms with her addictions and find out whether she accidentally helped her boyfriend overdose. She trashes her mom's country house, shares a bottle of Wild Turkey with a homeless man and describes herself as "another fallen institution... further proof that children of famous people are like communismAbetter in concept than in practice." While it is witty at times, this tale of meltdown and resurrection is ultimately too much like its protagonist: sexy but superficial. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
