Tara Isabella Burton’s debut novel Social Creature plumbs the depths of intense female friendships—obsession, manipulation, co-dependence, rejection, murder—with an eerie emotional accuracy but the light touch of a fast thriller. Nearly every review has referred to the story as “Ripleyesque.” It closely recalls Patricia Highsmith’s midcentury social noir: We know smitten striver Louise and manic proto-socialite Lavinia are doomed from the first chapter. “Lavinia isn’t like other people,” a close and personal omniscient narrator pipes in, “And when, six months from now, Lavinia dies, she will be thinking exactly of this night,” that is, the first time the two of them stayed out drinking until dawn. Burton, a theology Ph.D. who threw herself into the literary nightlife in the big city after her return from grad school abroad, brings pitch black satire of the careless class into the social media age. The obsessive friendship at the core of the story plays out in Facebook and Instagram posts—and so does the inevitable murderer’s alibi.
Louise, who passes for younger than her 29 years, is a bottle-blonde aspiring writer who grew up in the shadow of a New Hampshire prep school and can’t bear to admit to herself or her parents that she hasn’t “made it” in New York. She’s working as an SAT tutor, ghost writer, and barista, indulging the occasional and always ill-fated Tinder date, barely affording her rent-controlled outer borough sublet, and skipping dinner to save money and stay thin, which she never was back home. Then she meets Lavinia, with her passion for vintage clothes, after-hours trespassing, and tipsily pronouncing her resolution to live life to the lees! Under her spell, Louise knows what she wants, too. To readers less enraptured with Lavinia’s pseudo-literary persona, news of her tragic fate will come as a relief—and an invitation to read on with more curiosity and less cringing, while Louise falls in love with her new friend’s life. Lavinia invites her into a world full of pretenders and preppy hangers-on that she’d never have had the credit limit or connections to infiltrate on her own. She gives Louise dresses, does her makeup, even lets her move in to her family’s otherwise vacant Upper East Side apartment—but never gives her a key. They take endless and selfies, drink too much champagne, recite Tennyson, get matching tattoos, and pledge to pursue truth, beauty, and virtue!
It’s hard to avoid the impression that Burton—now a religion writer at Vox—is lampooning her younger self, at least in part. Making Louise a delirious handmaiden to Lavinia and a terminal outsider who claws her way to the center of this new circle of rich, young party people permits her a writerly distance from which to belittle privileged millennials’ vanity, selfishness, and failure of perspective. But jealousy, insecurity, and a frustration with her grubby and stagnant aging striver’s life on the outermost edges of ambition muddy Louise’s perspective, too. After her first night out with Lavinia, she answers a homeless catcaller she’d always ignored and fights free from him, in a violent bit of foreshadowing that almost convinces her to quit the world she wasn’t made for, that’s made her feel dangerously and delusionally untouchable for one wild and wonderful night: “Maybe the moon is full. Maybe the stars are bright. Maybe cigarettes smell like incense. But not for her, she thinks. Never for people like her, who don’t live on the Upper East Side, who don’t go to Yale, who aren’t even naturally blonde.” But Lavinia lures her back uptown, with opera tickets and encouragement to write. The first pieces she gets published, thanks to Lavinia’s connections, are about the prep school she wished she’d attended in her old hometown. And on the cusp of her birthday—she lies about her age to Lavinia’s friends, all younger than she—Louise learns she’ll make it on the “Five Under Thirty” list at The Fiddler, a scenesters’ literary magazine loosely based on The Baffler.
She’s “made it,” come further than she’d held out hope she would the last several years of scraping by. But the cost makes us wonder whether a woman like Louise could ever have found such success playing by the rules. She’s a gifted enough writer to win the coveted but essentially meaningless approval of the Scene, only once she’s moved in with Lavinia as a dependent, dropped her three jobs, and finally found the time and space to work and live all while waiting for the darkest excesses of her new life to catch up with her.
On its surface, the story is a well-worn indictment of these shallow markers of status that come so much more easily to the rich and socially well-seated. But its more interesting and more original dimension is the destructive interplay between two jealous and codependent female friends. They gush over each other’s outfits and give one another what they both lacked. Louise lends flighty Lavinia a certain seriousness. And, Lavinia claims, the motivation she’ll need to finish the indulgent and—as Louise learns, but knows better than to admit—embarrassingly bad manuscript she claims she took leave from Yale, years ago, to work on. Louise gives Lavinia near constant adoration and a semblance of stability, as a loyal handmaiden ought. Lavinia, though, gives Louise everything she needs to re-create herself—and Louise takes it all. What she finds on the other side is not some moralistic revelation that the life she coveted is actually vapid and ultimately unrewarding: Rather, that it can never really be hers. She’ll spend the rest of her days looking over her shoulder, and worst of all perhaps, she learns that while she may be a better writer, she can never really be Lavinia.
The men in Social Creature—dolts, rejects, a preppy date rapist, Lavinia’s secondhand boyfriend, even a social-climbing defrocked Orthodox priest—are ancillary foils, almost entirely oblivious to the furiously amoral sorcery that consumes the tragic heroines. This is what’s most relevant, and feels most revolutionary about the book. Not its suggestion of an anti-classist moral or even the affectionate observations of Lavinia’s renunciant little sister, an aspiring nun named (a touch excessively) Cordelia.
The story’s whole rise and fall, and its searing sendup of the power social media have to warp our perceptions of life, death, good, and evil, take place between two irredeemable young women: Both recognizable types, both evenly sympathetic, both totally doomed. In the end, the centermost drama’s absence of men makes even a novel that owes so much to pulpy society thrillers of the past entirely fresh.
