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WORK TITLE: Social Creature
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1990?
WEBSITE: http://www.taraisabellaburton.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1990.
EDUCATION:Oxford University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Staff writer on the Vox website.
AWARDS:Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, Spectator, 2012; Lowell Thomas Award, 2016.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications, including the New Statesman, American Interest, 1843, National Geographic, London Telegraph, Granta, Pank, Great Jones Street, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic. Contributor to networks, including the BBC and Al Jazeera, and to websites, including Tor.com and Salon.
SIDELIGHTS
Tara Isabella Burton is a writer who has produced works of both fiction and nonfiction. She has served as a staff writer to the Vox website and has written articles that have appeared in publications, including the New Statesman, American Interest, 1843, National Geographic, London Telegraph, Granta, Pank, Great Jones Street, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic.
In 2018, Burton releasedther novel, Social Creature. It finds Louise struggling to get by in New York when she meets the wealthy and exciting Lavinia. The two quickly become close. Though Lavinia is demanding and domineering, Louise is charmed by her colorful life. Louise is devastated when Lavinia attempts to detach from their friendship and goes to dangerous lengths to maintain her new social status.
Burton told Arielle Bernstein, writer on the Rumpus website: “I wanted to tell a story about imposter syndrome, and obsessive, erotic female friendship, and about the construction of identity. The realization that, to tell that story well, and to take those characters to the extreme places I wanted them to go, a thriller-adjacent plot was the best way to serve those characters and themes. But the death was actually a late-stage addition to this story.” Burton added: “Social Creature isn’t based on any one real relationship, but is more a composite of the friendships I’ve experienced or seen where you suddenly realize that you are a character in someone else’s drama. This gives female friendships a kind of erotic charge that is partially about admiration for someone else, but also, really, a reflection of who you want to be.” In a radio interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a transcript of which appeared on the National Public Radio website, Burton stated: “There’s a fundamental emptiness to all of the characters in the book. And because they’re searching for something—and they’re searching in the wrong places. And I think that’s why, for me, these characters are as unlikable as they are are not, I hope, impossible to empathize with because what they’re fundamentally searching for is something very human and very, I believe, universal.”
Critics offered favorable assessments of Social Creature. Annie Bostrom, reviewer in Booklist, asserted: “This fast-paced, stylish, dialogue- and character-driven debut from journalist and scholar Burton will definitively ensnare readers.” “This devious, satisfying novel perfectly captures a very narrow slice of the Manhattan demimonde,” suggested a Publishers Weekly writer. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked: “Religion and culture writer Burton’s first foray into long-form fiction is at once a thrilling and provocative crime novel [and] a devastating exploration of female insecurity.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2018, Annie Bostrom, review of Social Creature, p. 24.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2018, review of Social Creature.
Publishers Weekly, April 16, 2018, review of Social Creature, p. 71; April 23, 2018, Ken Salikof, author interview, p. 64.
ONLINE
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (June 14, 2018), Lauren Sarazen, review of Social Creature.
National Public Radio Online, https://www.npr.org/ (June 3, 2018), Lulu Garcia-Navarro, author interview.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (June 21, 2018), Arielle Bernstein, author interview.
Tara Isabella Burton website, http://www.taraisabellaburton.com/ (July 2, 2018).
Tara Isabella Burton has followed a female hermit into the remote Caucasus, gotten love amulets from Turkish Islamic shamans, and held signs with the street preachers of Las Vegas.
Her work on religion, culture, and place can be found at National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, The Economist's 1843, Aeon, The BBC, The Atlantic, The American Interest, Salon, The New Statesman, The Telegraph, and more. Her fiction can or shall be found in Granta, Volume 1 Brooklyn, The New Yorker's Daily Shouts, Great Jones Street, Tor.com, PANK, Shimmer, and other places. She has received The Spectator's 2012 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a 2016 Lowell Thomas Award.
Her first novel, Social Creature, praised by The New York Times' Janet Maslin as "a wicked original with echoes of the greats", is forthcoming from Doubleday (US) and Bloomsbury/Raven (UK) in June 2018. It will be translated into nine more languages, including Italian, French, and Russian. She is also working on a non-fiction book about new religious and "replacement religion" movements, Strange Rites: Cults and Subcultures After the Death of God, to be published by Public Affairs in 2019.
Tara recently completed a doctorate in theology as a Clarendon Scholar at Trinity College, Oxford. She is currently a staff writer on the religion beat at Vox.
Contact: Tara is represented by Emma Parry (US) & Rebecca Carter (UK) at Janklow & Nesbit Associates.
QUOTED: "There's a fundamental emptiness to all of the characters in the book. And because they're searching for something - and they're searching in the wrong places. And I think that's why, for me, these characters as unlikable as they are are not, I hope, impossible to empathize with because what they're fundamentally searching for is something very human and very, I believe, universal."
A Tale Of Obsession In 'Social Creature'
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June 3, 20188:14 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with author Tara Isabella Burton about her debut novel Social Creature. It's a dark tale of characters willing to do whatever it takes to get money and attention.
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Tara Isabella Burton's debut novel "Social Creature" is a tale about obsession. It follows Louise. She's a failed writer working three jobs in New York City. Life for Louise is mundane. That's until she meets Lavinia. The rich socialite introduces Louise to a world of lavish parties and reckless abandon. It's all Louise ever wanted. But when her friendship with Lavinia is under threat, she will do whatever it takes to keep it from falling apart. Author Tara Isabella Burton joins me now from our NPR studios in New York City.
Welcome to the program.
TARA ISABELLA BURTON: Thank you so much it's a delight to be here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell us what inspired this.
BURTON: I'm from New York City originally, but I moved to England for almost a decade for college and grad school. And I started coming back more and more in my mid-20s. And in that time, I fell in love with New York, and I fell in love with it both as a kind of homecoming and as a slight outsider having been gone so long. And I became sort of obsessed with going out and trying to live life as art and fell in with a wonderful, wild, mad group of people that wanted the same things and also trying to define ourselves against one another. Particularly, you know, in New York in your 20s in this cutthroat world became something I really wanted to write about.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Break it down for our listeners. Lavinia is this sort of larger than life madcap figure, wealthy.
BURTON: Yes, Lavinia, I think, for me the defining characteristic is that she believes wholeheartedly in living life as art and having the most extraordinary kind of poetic experience possible, which on the face of it isn't necessarily a bad thing. But what she doesn't realize is that it takes so much privilege to be able to live for that and to be so carefree and reckless and to stay out all night. You can stay out all night, when you don't have to be somewhere the next morning.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And Louise is not that. She comes from not affluence. And she is struggling to sort of keep her head above ground in New York City.
BURTON: Absolutely. She does not have an enormous degree of privilege. And she is making it on her own. In a sense, she is someone who would like all the things Lavinia has. And she and Lavinia, despite their surface differences, are very similar. They both don't have a strong sense of self. They both need to define themselves through other people, through accomplishments, through everything from social media to literary bylines to who they're dating to what they're wearing. Their relationship is characterized, I think, by this obsessive co-dependency. It's very easy to say because Lavinia has financial privilege and wields it as a tool over Louise offering her a free place to stay, offering her clothing, offering her tickets to the opera and parties that Lavinia has a lot of power. And of course she does. But Lavinia's also very needy. And what Louise has is the ability to say to Lavinia your writing is good. You look beautiful. You...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Give her validation.
BURTON: Yeah, exactly. And I think that Louise realizes that this is a way for her to wield power.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You cover religion as a beat as a journalist. Is it our new religion, you know, money and fame and social media and that kind of mix?
BURTON: I think that we all look for meaning, and we all want there to be a grand narrative in our lives. And I think certainly as a religion journalist covering everything from Catholicism and evangelicalism to new religious movements, that's certainly something I see. I think this book was very much informed by my work as a religion reporter. I was interested in characters in a pretty - I'd say - secular environment searching for meaning, searching for order and structure in their lives and finding it through these illusory forms of self-creation.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, Louise says this in the book. I'm going to read it here. You can lose weight. You can dye your hair. You can learn to speak with a very charming mid-Atlantic accent. You can stay up until 4 in the morning missing your own deadlines just to read somebody's novel and tell them how great it is. But nothing, nothing you do will ever be enough. Is she saying something there about the holes that we have with us that can never be filled? This yearning for something that we can never quite get?
BURTON: I think, you know, everything from Lavinia's aesthetic existence longing for beauty and poetry to Louise's passionate hunger to be loved are all coming from the same place, which is the absence of something, some sense of order, some sense of meaning, some sense of goodness. There's a fundamental emptiness to all of the characters in the book. And because they're searching for something - and they're searching in the wrong places. And I think that's why, for me, these characters as unlikable as they are are not, I hope, impossible to empathize with because what they're fundamentally searching for is something very human and very, I believe, universal.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Tara Isabella Burton. Her debut novel is called "Social Creature," and it's out this Tuesday. Thank you.
BURTON: Thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF AGNES OBEL SONG, “IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN”)
QUOTED: "I wanted to tell a story about imposter syndrome, and obsessive, erotic female friendship, and about the construction of identity. The realization that, to tell that story well, and to take those characters to the extreme places I wanted them to go, a thriller-adjacent plot was the best way to serve those characters and themes. But the death was actually a late-stage addition to this story."
"Social Creature isn’t based on any one real relationship, but is more a composite of the friendships I’ve experienced or seen where you suddenly realize that you are a character in someone else’s drama. This gives female friendships a kind of erotic charge that is partially about admiration for someone else, but also, really, a reflection of who you want to be."
THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW #141: TARA ISABELLA BURTON
BY ARIELLE BERNSTEIN
June 21st, 2018
The word that first comes to mind when I think of Tara Isabella Burton’s work is feast. Her travel writing features sumptuous landscapes and vivid interviews, while her critical essays—on religion, literature, and art—immerse readers in an intellectual history that is vibrant, richly detailed, and filled with unique glimpses into the way that our cultural attitudes are shaped by time and place.
Burton, whose work has been featured here at The Rumpus, and in National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, has now published her first novel. In Social Creature, Burton uses her exceptional eye for detail in order to explore the thrilling and toxic friendship between two women—Louise, who has nothing, and Lavinia, who appears to have everything, each of whom is trying desperately to be seen.
Recently, Burton and I discussed the process of writing a novel, vintage clothes, and how social media has helped millennial women define themselves.
***
The Rumpus: You’ve been writing nonfiction for years, and now a novel. Have you always written in both genres? Was writing a novel something you always wanted to do?
Tara Isabella Burton: I’ve actually written quite a few novels, none of which were publishable! I found that in every work I developed my voice further and had a clearer sense for the story I wanted to tell. Social Creature’s roots were actually in an earlier novel I had written when I was nineteen, about a toxic female friendship. When I mentioned to my agent that I was interested in writing a novel about New York, she pondered about how there had never been a female Mr. Ripley, and this ended up inspiring me to reimagine my original story in this completely new setting.
I come from a theater background, which I think also helped liberate me from this idea that everything had to be right the first try. You never expect the first rehearsal to be perfect. It’s normal to try and then retry in the process of creating a final product.
Rumpus: Did you always know that you wanted to write a thriller?
Burton: I had no idea that I was writing a thriller! I’d always thought of myself as a writer of literary fiction, and earlier drafts of this novel didn’t really have many “thriller” elements at all. I wanted to tell a story about imposter syndrome, and obsessive, erotic female friendship, and about the construction of identity. The realization that, to tell that story well, and to take those characters to the extreme places I wanted them to go, a thriller-adjacent plot was the best way to serve those characters and themes. But the death was actually a late-stage addition to this story.
But one thing I will say is that the process of writing many novels helped me to understand why plot was important. In my earlier novels, I would focus almost exclusively on character, so the idea of writing a page-turner was really foreign to me.
But what I learned over time is that a really good story becomes the backbone to explore character more deeply. Having the idea to write a “female Ripley” helped to breathe new life into my characters and create a story with a purpose.
Rumpus: What interests you most about female friendship?
Burton: I’m interested in how women in their twenties are trying to figure out who they are and how they often try to find that out through their relationships with other women. Social Creature isn’t based on any one real relationship, but is more a composite of the friendships I’ve experienced or seen where you suddenly realize that you are a character in someone else’s drama. This gives female friendships a kind of erotic charge that is partially about admiration for someone else, but also, really, a reflection of who you want to be.
I also think there’s so much scope for good, quote unquote literary novels about female relationships. I think I’m conscious, too, of the way in which female writers and female-led stories in particular tend to be dismissed as commercial, or “fun” “beach reads” in a way that male-led stories aren’t. And in the marketing for this book, I’ve tried really hard to avoid talking about, say, the clothing of the characters (despite the fact that it’s a major part of the way in which they construct their identity), or the Upper East Side aesthetic out of a fear that they would lead to the book not being taken seriously. I wanted to write American Psycho rather than Gossip Girl. But the irony is that Bret Easton Ellis can spend pages and pages talking about Patrick Bateman’s skin care products, or his business cards, and have that be a serious character or identity marker, whereas talking about the way in which women create personae through clothing is somehow “unserious.” I want to make a case for the serious, literary legitimacy of the female experience of self-construction.
Rumpus: I know a lot of your nonfiction is also interested in looking at the ways we perform for one another. Do you find the process of writing fiction and nonfiction similar?
Burton: For me, nonfiction is more of an interpretive process of connecting the dots, whereas with fiction you are not interpreting so much as creating a story. Emotionally, they feel very similar to me, though; as a travel writer, I gained a lot of experience focusing on details. Details, of course, help you to think about how a moment, experience, conversation—whatever—can also tell us a story. I approach my characters in this same type of journalistic way.
Rumpus: Reading about the glamour and mystique of this very young and wealthy New York City lifestyle was like an anthropological experience for me. What was it like for you as a writer to capture this very specific world?
Burton: I am from the Upper East Side, and most of this book takes place in the Upper West, so I see myself as both somewhat of an insider as well as an outsider in exploring his place. The world of Social Creature is really an amalgamation of many New York City subcultures.
Rumpus: Did you assume that your readers would be familiar with New York?
Burton: I don’t have any assumption about my readers! I do think that my book speaks to a particularly female experience, but I also think that men could get something out of it, too. My ideal audience is someone who thinks she (or he) is too much. Someone who is emotionally intense and who reads this book will get that intensity so much that they then want to sleep with this book underneath their pillow.
Rumpus: A lot of that intensity is captured in the way that characters use social media to express themselves. Did you think about your own use of social media?
Burton: I don’t really have a lot of concerns about social media use. In fact, I have really positive feelings about social media! I had a bad eating disorder in my teens and social media was a way to create an image of myself that I was proud of and felt comfortable with. I think there is something beautiful about trying to become that perfect person. I like people who are performative on social media and I feel comfortable with it. I grew up on LiveJournal, which seemed even more of an intimate kind of self-creation than the way we curate a certain kind of image now.
Rumpus: You have a love of vintage clothes and you explore fashion throughout Social Creature. What was it like to write about your character’s fashion choices throughout this text?
Burton: I collect vintage clothes and I wanted to capture this unique subculture that I am a part of. When we began discussing film rights, I was very clear that the women in my story wouldn’t want to wear designer clothes—that, for someone like Lavinia, finding a unique dress is about crafting a special identity more than asserting a certain kind of status. The women in this world are very conscious of using fashion to become “self-created” rather than even necessarily beautiful. It’s an aesthetic approach to life—both an act of creation, as well as control.
Rumpus: Speaking of “self-created,” I know that you have any number of other projects that you are working on right now, both in terms of fiction and nonfiction.
Burton: That’s right! I’m doing religion coverage over at Vox, which I love. I’m also working on my next novel, which takes place at a boarding school. My elevator pitch is that it is Blue Velvet meets A Separate Peace.
Rumpus: What books do you keep coming back to? And what’s new on your bookshelf that you are most excited about?
Burton: I love gigantic Russian nineteenth-century novels! And classic writers like Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence and Henry James. In terms of modern literature, I love Gone Girl, especially how it handles these huge societal taboos about what it means to be female. It’s something I think Social Creature deals with too, as all these female characters are just pouring their emotional hearts out. That’s what I think is so interesting about our use of social media today. How each of us is Lavinia on the outside and Louise on the inside, but how hard it is for us to really see that.
Arielle Bernstein's writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and AV Club. She teaches writing at American University and is working on both a novel and memoir. More from this author →
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Print Marked Items
What Should a Woman Be? PW TALKS
WITH TARA ISABELLA BURTON
Ken Salikof
Publishers Weekly.
265.17 (Apr. 23, 2018): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Tara Isabella Burton's excellent debut, Social Creature (Doubleday, June), is a Patricia Highsmith--esque
novel about the fluidity of identity in the age of social media.
What was your inspiration for this novel?
When I was about 19, I wrote a long and absolutely unpublishable novel about a toxic, overly involved
female friendship inspired by a deeply unhealthy series of college relationships I'd had. Because I was 19,
of course, the novel read like Daphne du Maurier fan fiction and I ended up putting it in a drawer. Then, one
day, as I was brainstorming ideas for a novel I wanted to write set in contemporary New York, my agent
casually made a comment about how there "weren't any female (Tom) Ripley" characters in fiction, and
jokingly asked if I'd ever considered one. Immediately a light bulb went off, I realized that these characters
should be reborn in contemporary New York. I never even looked at the old manuscript. A couple months
later, Social Creature was done.
So do you feel the book owes a debt to Patricia Highsmith, creator of Tom Ripley?
Absolutely. The thrillers I love do tend to be of the Highsmith and du Maurier ilk--intense, high-stakes,
sensual, character-driven. For years my writing was probably too informed by that aesthetic. But with
Social Creature, I wanted to take the epic feel and intense emotional melodrama of those classics and see if
they could work organically into a modern story: one where the social media-driven setting could serve the
characters, rather than the other way around.
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There seems to be a trend of novels about cunning young women. How do you account for this?
I think in general characters are at their most interesting when they're at their most transgressive, when
elements of their personalities highlight and explore cultural anxieties and tensions. It's why I love Amy in
Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl so much--her sociopathy hits us in the gut because it ties into so many of our
cultural ambiguities about what a woman "should" be. And I think at a time when gender politics are so
heavily debated, and what it means to be a woman in the "right" way is in flux, we long to--and need to--
read about women whose stories and personalities tie into and speak to those anxieties.
How do you think social media has transformed modern life?
Not that much, actually. I did my doctoral thesis on theology and the idea of self-creation and "life as art" in
the 19th century dandies of Paris--basically, that self-creation is a form of making meaning and giving
significance to one's existence and one's own story. Self-invention, and using whatever media tools were
available, from art to newspapers to today's social media, is a pretty consistent element of the human
experience. That said, I think the pace and intensity of that experience on the internet may ramp up that
tendency to a nightmarish degree.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Salikof, Ken. "What Should a Woman Be? PW TALKS WITH TARA ISABELLA BURTON." Publishers
Weekly, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 64. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532879/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5cc25762. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532879
QUOTED: "This fast-paced, stylish, dialogue- and character-driven debut from journalist and scholar Burton will definitively ensnare readers."
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Social Creature
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
114.18 (May 15, 2018): p24.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Social Creature.
By Tara Isabella Burton.
June 2018. 288p. Doubleday, $26.95 (9780385543521).
Louise Wilson, who wants to write but instead works three jobs and still struggles to make rent on her
Brooklyn studio, leads a lonely life before she meets Lavinia Williams. When Lavinia, an aspiring writer
who can afford to be one, hires Louise to tutor her younger sister, who needs no help, the two hit it off.
Beginning on New Year's 2015, Lavinia ushers Louise into her glamorous and debauched New York life.
They end their nights at dawn, reciting poetry as they promised they would with their new, matching tattoos
("MORE POETRY.!!"). It's quickly clear that Lavinia has polished a dusty, lost soul into a sparkling best
friend before, and things didn't end well. The narrator soon addresses the reader--a recurring device--to
reveal that Lavinia will soon die. This fast-paced, stylish, dialogue- and character-driven debut from
journalist and scholar Burton will definitively ensnare readers. Diabolically playing on what we think we
know about others and what we reveal about ourselves in the social-media age, it will give readers the
creeps, too.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Social Creature." Booklist, 15 May 2018, p. 24. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541400804/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6013969e.
Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541400804
QUOTED: "This devious, satisfying novel perfectly captures a very narrow slice of the Manhattan demimonde."
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Social Creature
Publishers Weekly.
265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p71.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Social Creature
Tara Isabella Burton. Doubleday, $26.95
(288p) ISBN 978-0-385-54352-1
Fans of the cult classic Poison Ivy will appreciate the mousy girl--wild girl dynamic on display in Burton's
fiendishly clever debut. At 29, insecure Louise Wilson is a would-be writer living in fear of the dictum, "if
you haven't made it in New York by 30, you never will." All that changes when she meets 23-year-old
socialite Lavinia Williams, who seems to be channeling the free spirit of the late Zelda Fitzgerald (with
flapper dresses to match). Larger-than-life Lavinia takes Louise under her wing and introduces her new
bestie to a Manhattan she never knew existed, including parties in haunted hotels and secret bookstores and
people with names like Beowulf Marmont and Athena Maidenhead, all the while dressing as if for a
costume ball that never ends. Only later does Louise experience the hateful, spiteful, jealous side of
Lavinia's personality in what becomes an ingenious dark thriller in the Patricia Highsmith Tom Ripley
mode. Louise and Lavinia are bold, brilliant characters. This devious, satisfying novel perfectly captures a
very narrow slice of the Manhattan demimonde. Agent: Emma Parry, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Social Creature." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 71. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532703/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a17f45c3.
Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532703
QUOTED: "Religion and culture writer Burton's first foray into long-form fiction is at once a thrilling and provocative crime novel [and] a devastating exploration of female insecurity."
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Burton, Tara Isabella: SOCIAL
CREATURE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Burton, Tara Isabella SOCIAL CREATURE Doubleday (Adult Fiction) $26.95 6, 5 ISBN: 978-0-385-
54352-1
A calculating introvert latches onto a needy extrovert in this dark, stylish debut.
Louise Wilson is a frumpy, friendless 29-year-old working three jobs and sleeping in an illegal sublet in a
nontrendy part of Brooklyn when she meets Lavinia Williams--a wealthy, vivacious 23-year-old "on a
sabbatical" from Yale, whose existence seems optimized for Facebook and Instagram. After the dazzling
young woman brings Louise to a debauched New Year's Eve bash, Louise resolves to remain in Lavinia's
orbit at all costs. To the dismay of her employers and the detriment of her bank account, Louise begins
shirking her responsibilities in order to satisfy Lavinia's every whim. Her sacrifices are initially worth the
spoils--Lavinia invites Louise to move in with her, and the two spend every waking moment living to
excess--but then the capricious socialite decides it's time to find a new companion, forcing Louise to take
desperate measures. Louise's story unfolds in the present tense via an omniscient narrator. The structure
heightens apprehension and uncertainty while the storyteller's dry wit, keen observations, and gossipy tone
promote the reader from detached observer to complicit confidant. Burton's exceptional character work
further elevates the tale; every individual is both victim and villain, imbuing their interactions with oceans
of emotional subtext and creating conflict that propels the book toward its shocking yet inevitable
conclusion.
Religion and culture writer Burton's first foray into long-form fiction is at once a thrilling and provocative
crime novel, a devastating exploration of female insecurity, and a scathing indictment of society's obsession
with social media.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Burton, Tara Isabella: SOCIAL CREATURE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700548/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bca43f17.
Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700548
An Irresponsible Obsession: Tara Isabella Burton’s “Social Creature”
By Lauren Sarazen
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JUNE 14, 2018
WITH SOCIAL CREATURE, Tara Isabella Burton presents a decadent portrait of wealthy, young New Yorkers and the lengths one might go to become one of them. Louise scrapes by in New York City juggling her barista gig, remote work for GlaZam, and SAT tutoring. At 29, the once-hopeful writer spends her scant spare time compulsively scrolling through clickbait rather than writing. Lavinia, on sabbatical from Yale, spends her days and nights chasing an idealized existence. The unlikely pair meet when Lavinia, desperate for a babysitter for her little sister, calls Louise for SAT tutoring. The agreed-upon three hours stretch until 6:00 a.m. as Louise waits for Lavinia to return and pay her.
When Louise offers to repair the torn hem of Lavinia’s feathered dress, these two disparate young women quickly accelerate into an increasingly toxic friendship. Drawn into nights of exclusive parties and expensive cocktail bars bankrolled by Lavinia, while cozying up to the city’s elite literary scene in borrowed clothes, Louise sees Lavinia’s finances and friendship open doors for her that had been firmly shut. But from the start, we know how Social Creature is going to end — the passionate, idealistic Lavinia will become the Dickie Greenleaf to Louise’s Tom Ripley, and it works.
Despite treading similar ground as Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley in its meditations on obsession and wealth, Social Creature remains distinct through its explicitly millennial perspective. Burton’s use of a close third-person narrative voice complements this perfectly, giving the story a healthy dose of dramatic irony as the characters continuously construct a parallel narrative online via their social media channels. Similarly, the choice to write in the present tense creates a compelling momentum as Louise’s role as best friend shifts following Lavinia’s abrupt demise.
Ironically, Lavinia is consumed by a fierce need to live. It’s a refrain throughout the novel, from captioning her photos “ah! je veux vivre!” to her New Year’s Resolution to “drink life to the lees.” Lavinia is no basic heiress. Prancing in fountains in vintage gowns, she likens herself to a millennial Anita Ekberg. Her photos are captioned with fragments of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry and her casual speech is peppered with lines from Macbeth. Fueled by a quest for poetic exhilaration, her antics are impractical, sometimes illegal, yet free of consequence. Breaking into the High Line after midnight, “[t]hey drink and Lavinia tells Louise about all the places they will go together, when they finish their stories, when they are both great writers — both of them — to Paris and to Rome and to Trieste, where James Joyce used to live, to Vienna to see the paintings, to Carnevale.” Lavinia longs for an extraordinary life, but are her dreams truly unique or simply a recycled narrative? She values Truth, Beauty, Art, Virtue. She bemoans the lack of true talent among her friends, longing for “nineteenth-century Paris” or somewhere with “people who were above all this horrible, pretentious” pseudo-intellectualism. Yet when Louise mentions that someone from the party had said almost the same thing, Lavinia’s self-perception as a transcendental aesthete is cracked.
In this sense, Social Creature perfectly captures the danger and inner workings of curating an idealized identity online. Running parallel to reality, social media’s structure expects users to provide constant check-ins, stories, statuses, photos, and event RSVPs, and Burton’s characters all play along. Their choice to mass-blast their lives online is undeniably relatable. I spend too much time on the internet, and chances are, you do too; there’s a reason apps exist solely for the purpose of curbing time wasted scrolling. Yet, this acquired taste for sharing has transformed narcissism into a social norm. In fact, we might not even see our carefully curated social media feeds as narcissism — we’re just sharing our opinion, or a photo or two. We have to document the moment. It was “one of those nights,” after all. In Lavinia’s case, social media props up her (often ridiculous) absolute commitment to her ideals through likes, and the overwhelming approval of her peer group arguably encourages her to continue on her path. Alarmingly, consistent social media activity is cast as equivalent to in-person interaction, making it possible for Lavinia’s death to slip by unnoticed; everyone is too busy liking her status to really think critically about her glaring absence.
Burton even translates the meticulous detail of a curated Instagram post through her vivid and precise descriptions. Details that might have been insignificant — the hazelnut-cinnamon-pear-cardamom tea they brew in an Uzbekistan teapot, the exact hue of Lavinia’s wine-dark lipstick, or Sehnsucht, and her custom-made perfume mingling lavender, tobacco, fig, and pear — become paramount. Similarly, she artfully sets her scenes. Tapping into Instagram aesthetics, pivotal points of the novel take place in visually stimulating locations: they burn a handkerchief belonging to Lavinia’s ex on the snowy High Line at night, they sacrifice a ruined dress to the sea with the Cyclone looming behind them, and primp for nights out in Lavinia’s apartment with its antique fans pinned like butterflies against the royal blue walls.
Likewise, the novel’s attention to the rules that govern social media is precise. Lavinia’s sparkling social calendar is well documented, thanks to Facebook. Alternating sips from a flask on the frozen Coney Island boardwalk in the wee hours of January 1, “they take a selfie of their naked bodies, from the lips down. They use their arms to cover their nipples, because otherwise Instagram will censor it.” At Bemelmans, they snap a selfie on Lavinia’s phone, and she sends it to Louise to post. “Tag me,” she says. “And make it public, okay?”
One of Social Creature’s overwhelming strengths is just how well it chronicles this obsession. The reader is completely leaning in, and, while this reaction is a mark of a compelling narrative, within this particular world, our engrossed fascination is part of the problem. Throughout the novel, affluence is seen as the tipping point between being in and being locked out. Louise gains entry to New York’s literary world through Lavinia. And sure, Lavinia is distinct: she loves vintage and captions her photos in French and Latin; she lost her virginity to Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3; and she enthusiastically performs her identity. She’s the type of girl who haunts the site of her first date, “[insists] they go all the time, in Lavinia’s opera cloaks, in Lavinia’s furs.” But would Lavinia be Lavinia without the money? Arguably, it’s her wealth that opens the door to cultivating her lavish eccentricities and brings her membership and clout within her intellectually poised group. At 23, Lavinia is sheltered by a seemingly endless pool of passive income (her bank balance reads $103,462.46 the first time Louise is sent to withdraw cash for her) and she lives rent-free in a lavish Upper East Side apartment that her parents own. Her complete disregard for Louise’s commitments to her jobs — and more poignantly, her lack of comprehension as to their necessary function for Louise’s survival — reveals just how oblivious she is to how people function in the real world.
In the aftermath of her first night as Lavinia’s friend, Louise realizes she’s trashed her borrowed dress, the dress that Lavinia considered a symbol of “beauty and truth and everything good in the world and maybe, even, the existence of God, is in shreds. There are wine stains. There are cigarette holes.” But Lavinia finds Louise’s genuine apology baffling. “We can always get another dress,” she shrugs. For Lavinia, there is always another dress.
While there is romance threaded through Social Creature, the central relationship at its heart isn’t a story of boy meets girl. Instead, Burton explores the darkness within female friendship. I used to think that some desperate thirst for male approval that was behind the insecurities that fractured young women, but after surviving catty high school girl groups, I’m persuaded to say it’s more likely to be toxic female friendships. A cursory glance at beloved narratives will tell you that we idealize female best friends: Cher and Dionne, Thelma and Louise, the real-life duo of Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. It’s you and me against the world, girlfriend. It’s a story we like.
But Social Creature is not that kind of story. Instead, Burton focuses on a different kind of friendship, the kind that builds in intensity until it becomes destructive. Louise discovers Lavinia’s friendships follow a careful pattern: an all-encompassing closeness that manipulates a fear of rejection to exert absolute control for about six months or so, then she discards them. When her demands on Louise’s time result in losing all three of her jobs, Lavinia seems to take pleasure in manipulating Louise’s dependence to get her own way. Yet Louise is unable to emotionally distance herself; her desperation is paired with adoration. Burton hints at this destructive dynamic almost at once. Mimi, Lavinia’s old best friend, mistakes Louise for Lavinia, kissing her neck, murmuring into her ear. After barely a minute with Mimi, Louise realizes that the “strange, pantomime way Mimi is talking” is designed to replicate Lavinia’s distinct speech. Both Mimi and Louise admire her with a ferocity that crosses the line of normal friendship. She becomes a point of comparison, revealing deep-seated feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. Lavinia is that friend — the effortlessly gorgeous one whose idea of a good time is an impossible cocktail of high-stakes risk and serendipity. She “made you feel so special. Until she didn’t […] [but] as long as you played the game…”
While Social Creature seems just too glamorous and magnetic to be true, New York magazine recently ran a piece concerning a fake German heiress. Anna Delvey, a social-climbing con artist, scammed her way through New York, defrauding both banks and her friend out of a collective $275,000. Though Burton confirmed that she wrote Social Creature before becoming aware of the story, the similarities hammer home the mirror it lifts toward our irresponsible obsession with status and effortless living.
¤
Lauren Sarazen graduated from Chapman University with a BFA in Creative Writing, and currently studies literature at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She lives in Paris.
Social Creature
By Tara Isabella Burton
Published 06.05.2018
Doubleday
288 Pages
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