National Bestseller and a New York Times editor's choice. Part comedy of manners, part treasure hunt, the much-anticipated first novel from the writer David Sedaris calls “perfectly, relentlessly funny.”
Kezia, Nathaniel, and Victor are reunited for the extravagant wedding of a college friend. Now at the tail end of their twenties, they arrive completely absorbed in their own lives—Kezia the second-in-command to a madwoman jewelry designer in Manhattan; Nathaniel the former literary cool kid, selling his wares in Hollywood; and the Eeyore-esque Victor, just fired from a middling search engine. They soon slip back into old roles: Victor loves Kezia. Kezia loves Nathaniel. Nathaniel loves Nathaniel.
In the midst of all this semi-merriment, Victor passes out in the mother-of-the-groom’s bedroom. He wakes to her jovially slapping him across the face. Instead of a scolding, she dangles before him a story she’s never even told her son, about a valuable necklace that disappeared during the Nazi occupation of France.
And so a madcap adventure is set into motion, one that leads Kezia, Nathaniel, and Victor from Miami to New York and LA to Paris and across France until they converge at the estate of Guy de Maupassant, author of the classic short story “The Necklace.”
Heartfelt, hilarious, suspenseful, and told with Sloane Crosley’s inimitable spark and wit, The Clasp is a story of obsession and the pitfalls of modern relationships, of friends struggling to fit together now that their lives haven’t gone as planned, of how to separate the real from the fake. Such a task might be possible when it comes to precious stones, but it is far more difficult to pull off with humans.
Praise for The Clasp
"Crosley is already an established humorist…and her signature wit is sharp as ever here. She is startlingly good at portraying comically awful characters who would seem cartoonish if they weren’t also so recognizable. Crosley is an incisive observer of human nature in general and of a generation in particular…. For all its humor, Crosley’s prose is equally sharp in delineating her characters’ despair. When, late in the novel, Nathaniel finally says the words Kezia has always wanted to hear from him, she wishes she could “give the gift of him saying it to her younger self, the one who needed to hear it.” All at once there is nothing funny, but something all too sad and true, in this highly comic, highly affecting novel." — The New York Times Book Review
“In her debut novel, The Clasp, Crosley’s talent for extracting hilarity from disappointment crosses over into fiction and thrives there… Amid all the travel and high jinks, the true journey of this book is a philosophical one. The book’s delicious humor and whirlwind plot help the book’s harshest medicine — important-but-sad epiphanies of life’s truths, both beautiful and cold — taste far more enjoyable than it would if delivered by a less-funny writer. The amusing adage “If I have to learn something, I’d rather have fun doing it” fits The Clasp well: Its humor is wildly entertaining, but relevance always shows up at the party.” — The San Francisco Chronicle
"Crosley is best known for her comic essays, some of which were collected in I Was Told There'd Be Cake, but her gifts—keen observation, mordant humor, an affinity for the bittersweet—translate surprisingly seamlessly into fiction. [A] sad, hopeful, endlessly entertaining book." — Lev Grossman, TIME
"Sloane Crosley graduates from delightful essayist to accomplished novelist in one giant step that she takes easily in The Clasp… The novel deepens even as the mood lightens. The madcap adventure is responsible for the latter, but it’s the profound connection that the lapsed friends rekindle that makes The Clasp a rich read." — The New York Daily News
"The newest—and arguably the funniest [tribute to “The Necklace”]—is Sloane Crosley’s The Clasp, a light-hearted but sincere novel about three college friends who reunite a decade after graduation and end up in a kind of soul-searching caper that takes them through New York, Los Angeles, Florida, and France…. Crosley’s comedy is nearly always upbeat…but it still manages to slyly investigate the downside of “personal authenticity,” that weird American obsession that distorts everything from our shopping habits to our national politics. In The Clasp, characters struggle on the brink of 30 to transform the fake—meaning the privately miserable and “successful” lives they’ve been pretending to lead—into something real…. Crosley has achieved a rare feat: a complex and clever work of homage that deepens the original by connecting it to contemporary life. The Clasp is a gentle, astute, funny, smart, and very entertaining book.” — The New Republic
"The breezy New York essayist with a post-millennial undertow hasn't radically altered her voice in transit to fiction. That's good, because Crosley's skittery wit and polished warmth make her first novel worthy of its meta-fictional basis, "The Necklace," Guy de Maupassant's short story about the fraudulence of our fetish for authenticity…. [a] luminous, ridiculous adventure, a caper in the French countryside that evokes both Amélie and The Pink Panther." — New York Magazine
"New York writer Sloane Crosley has created an exuberant homage of her own...There is barely a page of the novel that doesn't glitter with some nugget of wit or wisdom." — The Guardian
“Wonderful and wacky. Crosley's a pundit of the absurd… Those who love [her] essays for the way they straddle the line between slapstick humor and essential truths will love her fiction too. Each sentence builds upon the last, toward one big wink: Isn't life weird? And isn't it great?” — Elle Magazine
“The Clasp, her debut novel, fairly bursts with [Crosley’s] trademark snappy patter…. At the literary heart of the mystery is the famous story by French writer Guy de Maupassant, about a lost necklace that ruins a poor woman’s life. As students, Victor and Nathaniel were present when their French professor embarrassed everyone by breaking down as she explained the story’s meaning; Victor alone envied her passion. The glory of this novel lies in showing how passion — not passivity — can reawaken even the most jaded 30-year-olds.” — The Toronto Star
“Crosley, with her quirky cleverness, seems more in league with the doohickeys of the world than with the emeralds. She’s interested not so much in transcendent beauty as in the small gears that hold people together and sometimes force them apart; when the objects you cherish could easily turn out to be fake, what matters is not what you cling to but the fact that you cling to it…. Crosley’s stylishness as a writer never tips over into shtickiness or stifles her warmth—it only makes the flowering of genuine emotion more powerful…. Crosley deftly rewrites The Great Gatsby, another exploration of authenticity and falsehood in which youngish friends and lovers seek to recapture the past. But in her version, the green light—the dream—never appears: These characters don’t even know what they want. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that their desires are too diffuse to collapse into a single brilliant point on the horizon.” — Slate
“A novel with more verve and imagination than much of the plot-light fare that typically gets the high-literary treatment, a story that shares at least some DNA with ambitious capers like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Fans of [Crosley’s] essays will be pleased to find that she’s just as funny and tenderly deprecating with her fictional characters as she is with herself.” — Vogue
“A knockout.” — O Magazine
“Her debut novel, The Clasp, is shot through with numerous inimitable Crosley-isms—wisecracking young sophisticates, trenchant yet occasionally perverse social observations, the errant (and unapologetic) pun. At its heart, though, it's a treasure hunt. Playing off the melodrama and social critique of Guy de Maupassant's classic 1884 short story "The Necklace," The Clasp pulls three college friends, now pushing 30 and each struggling with their own versions of existential disenchantment, along a journey of literal and figurative discovery.” — Meghan Daum, Interview Magazine
"What separates The Clasp from other novels in the same vein is Crosley's immense wit...[Her] brisk romp is one of the funniest literary debuts in years." — Paste Magazine
"There was no guarantee that Crosley's humour - keen-eyed, sometimes verging on mean-eyed observations about the people and world around her - would successfully survive the transition to fiction, but she nails it... The twist in de Maupassant's tale is that the titular trinket is fake; The Clasp, on the other hand, proves that Crosley's talent is very real." — The Independent
"Crosley's sardonic wit makes the book a sly page-turner; like listening to a story told by a friend with a knack for making everything just a little funnier than it really is... And [The Clasp's] treasure-hunt elements are irresistible." — The Seattle Times
"An amusingly satisfying literary aperitif for those who can quote Foucault or Tupac interchangeably." — The Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Sloane Crosley is one of the sharpest and funniest writers around." —The Onion
"When did I last read a first novel as good as this one? Sloane Crosley is a bit like Anne Tyler at her best, I kept thinking." — London Evening Standard
"Taking a page from her essay collections (I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number), Crosley once again brandishes a mix of smarts and sarcasm to commemorate some of life's more mortifying moments in her first work of fiction...[The Clasp] makes not only for fun reading but hints at the surprisingly poignant extent of just how far old acquaintances will go to save one another's hides." — Publishers Weekly
"Crosley is an innate storyteller and writes with her signature wit and flair. Each character’s flaw—whether it be Victor’s apathy, Kezia’s need to be needed or Nathaniel’s self-absorption—is relatable, and The Clasp speaks to flaws in humanity and friendships in a charming and realistic way. This novel entertains even as it provokes internal examination of one’s own relationships." — BookPage
"Crosley's smart, sardonic, sometimes-zany, yet also sensitive story is told from the alternating perspectives of these three linked characters, taking the readers along as they reunite first for a friend's wedding in Miami and then again for a road trip in France, setting off from Paris in pursuit of, yes, a priceless necklace but also of things far more valuable: the truth about themselves and one another, a genuine sense of purpose, and, perhaps most precious of all, a connection to one another...a real gem." — Kirkus Reviews
