Recently read: Spoiled

[Originally published at the now defunct group blog explananda.com]

Caitlin Macy. Spoiled: Stories

Spoiled is a collection of short stories, all of them featuring women or girls, most of them wealthy Manhattanites, usually newly wealthy. The stories are about the problems and preoccupations of this class: difficult maids and nannies, rivalries over status and wealth, struggles with envy and schadenfreude. I only come into occasional glancing contact with the types depicted in these stories—just often enough to see that Macy has a pretty good eye for social observation. But what a cold eye: there isn’t a genuinely sympathetic character in the book; nor is there a single moment of intimacy or warmth between two human beings. I expect a lot of people would find the privileged characters in this book too obnoxious to justify the trouble of reading an entire book about them, but I actually found my interest more or less sustained throughout. The writing is uneven: weak in places, pretty good in others.

Comments

Author: Nick
Date: 2009-05-09

I don’t think there isn’t a genuinely sympathetic character in the class.