An intelligent and madly entertaining debut novel reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise, and City of Glass that is at once a missing-person mystery, an exorcism of modern culture, and a wholly singular vision of contemporary womanhood from a terrifying and often funny voice of a new generation.
A woman known only by the letter A lives in an unnamed American city with her roommate, B, and boyfriend, C, who wants her to join him on a reality show called That’s My Partner! A eats (or doesn’t) the right things, watches endless amounts of television, often just for the commercials—particularly the recurring cartoon escapades of Kandy Kat, the mascot for an entirely chemical dessert—and models herself on a standard of beauty that only exists in such advertising. She fixates on the fifteen minutes of fame a news-celebrity named Michael has earned after buying up his local Wally Supermarket’s entire, and increasingly ample, supply of veal.
Meanwhile B is attempting to make herself a twin of A, who hungers for something to give meaning to her life, something aside from C’s pornography addiction, and becomes indoctrinated by a new religion spread throughout a web of corporate franchises, which moves her closer to the decoys that populate her television world, but no closer to her true nature.
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“This frequently impressive debut has some of George Saunders’s loony satire and some of Don DeLillo’s bone-deep paranoia. The young woman who narrates it, referred to only as A, is assailed from without by the culture’s dominant ideas about appetite and beauty, and from within by her own neuroses…The symbols of modern anomie in this novel are familiar (soulless supermarkets, insane mass entertainments, etc.), but Ms. Kleeman has a singular, off-kilter style, and a distinct vision of the absurd horrors that can come with being trapped in a body..”
— New York Times
“This debut novel from future superstar Alexandra Kleeman…Very funny, perfectly weird, a hyperintelligent commentary on a culture obsessed with you and fame…A dark, unflattering portrait of a generation that will probably remind you of a lot of people you know.”
— Vanity Fair“Don’t be fooled by the sassy title—the cravings that lurk beneath the surface in this completely original debut will haunt what a body means to you indefinitely.”
— Marie Claire“A satirical and searing critique of modern-day womanhood.”
— Chicago Tribune“The smartest, strangest novel I’ve read in a while.”
— Paris Review (staff pick)“Her darkly satirical debut lays bare the ravages of advertising-fueled culture and consumerism, through a purposefully distorted version of our reality. Fans of DeLillo, Pynchon, and Shteyngart are advised to take note.”
— Huffington Post“Kleeman’s debut novel is a fever dream of modern alienation…[It’s] not really like any other, but could be described as a blend of the nightmarish disassociation of DeLillo’s White Noise and the phantasmagoria of Bergman’s Persona. A challenging novel, but undoubtedly one with something to say.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Alexandra Kleeman is an NYC-based writer of fiction and nonfiction, and a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. Her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, Guernica, and Gulf Coast, among other publications. Nonfiction essays and reportage have appeared in Tin House, n+1, and the Guardian. Her work has received scholarships and grants from Bread Loaf, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ArtFarm Nebraska.