The Wrecking Ball

August 4, 2008
Spens’s protagonist, Alice, just a few years older than the debut novelist herself, is the product of a transcontinental teenagehood, a British-born child of exceptionally wealthy, divorced parents with a tony Connecticut boarding school education—including intensives in psychedelics, cocaine and the old vodka-in-an-Evian-bottle trick. After graduation, Alice hangs around London dabbling in fashion and the attention of men—first Hugo, a man twice her age, and then Harry, a depressed would-be songwriter with a pedigree similar to her own. Ostensibly the story of Alice’s unrequited love for Harry, Spens’s novel also forward marches through fashion shows and fetes, cigarettes and pills, stargazing and navel-gazing. The narrative flits back and forth in time and alternates hazy points of view among Alice, Harry and Alice’s pill-happy best friend, Rose. The big field party that brings all three stories together, the Wrecking Ball, gives them a suitably soft spot to land, but the confessional narrative collapses in amoral inanity before then, ending up in a discomfiting netherworld between Gossip Girl
and A Million Little Pieces
.

September 1, 2008
Written when she was only 19, Spens first novelabout three drug-addled adolescent lives spinning out of control in trendiest Londonreverberates with echoes of such disparate influences as Lewis Carroll (the protagonists name is Alice), F. Scott Fitzgerald (think The Beautiful and the Damned), and Evelyn Waugh (Vile Bodies). In its more existential moments, there are even hints of Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea). Sound like a masterpiece? Well, its not. The first-person voices of the four principal characters all sound too much alike and a bit annoying in their mannered, stream-of-consciousness, singsong rhythms (Joyce, anyone?); the same characters are too one-dimensional, defined principally by their drinking and drugging. And who cares about rich London kids who dont have to work or clean up their messes? All that said, the book does have enough passages of quite fine writing to hold the readers attention and, moreover, a consistent visionalbeit a hellish oneof an enervated world that has lost its way.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)