‘Social Creature’ by Tara Isabella Burton: Life isn’t real until you post it
A stylishly written, engrossing read, this is a story of stolen identity, fraud, and shallow longings -- and a thought-provoking exploration of the blurred lines between actual and digital reality. Kind of "Sex and the City" meets "The Talented Mr. Ripley" for the social media generation.
Social Creature
By Tara Isabella Burton
Doubleday. 273 pp. $26.95.
Reviewed by Jackie Schifalacqua
One great big emoji wow for this book. Social Creature (lovely, ironic title) begins as a story of the Manhattan twentysomething high life and becomes a tale of stolen identity and its dark side. And it explores how, at least at the slight depth of the digital, the lines that we call “the real” and “the virtual” can blur. It’s Sex and the City meets The Talented Mr. Ripley for the social-media generation. To read this book, despite the darkness, is to love it.
Louise is a self-absorbed, ambitious, floundering girl from New Hampshire soon to be turning 30. Now in Manhattan and struggling to pay her rent, she encounters her only proximity to anything approaching greatness: Lavinia, an egotistical loser with money. Lavinia takes Louise into her party life.
Oh, for nights of abandon and days of oblivion. Ah, youth in a big city. Think of the days of partying hard, forgetting to sleep, and making it to work anyhow. Social Creature doesn’t romanticize Lavinia’s life; it’s pretty toxic. But it will soon come in handy to her poorer friend.
Addicted to her own hype on Instagram, Lavinia is too in love with herself to care about observing. Why listen when you can talk? Why see when you can snap a photo? Between champagne and lines of cocaine, Lavinia is fond of collecting lackey girlfriends, photographing them, posting the photos on Facebook, and creating a story.
Louise finds it hard to refuse the attention. Lavinia gives Louise more than that: She gives her her ATM number, and Louise discovers a bank account of $100,000-plus, from which she happily begins drawing.
Eventually Lavinia’s infatuation with Louise dies — and so does Lavinia. Well, at least in the living flesh. By the power of social media, Louise decides to keep Lavinia alive through Facebook posts and text messages.
For Louise, it’s easy. Louise is a writer, and a couple of months with the living Lavinia have furnished enough material to keep the latter vividly and digitally alive. Louise does it very well. Eventually, because of Lavinia’s contacts and still-hefty ATM account, Louise finds herself becoming a rising star among under-30 writers.
Five months elapse, yet not one online “friend” realizes there is no Lavinia there. With a nod to Gertrude Stein’s purported description of Oakland, there is no there there: Lavinia exists nowhere but on the screen, where there isn’t anything there anyway. (Of course, there wasn’t much of a there there with the organic Lavinia in the first place.) In many ways Lavinia’s life on the internet is more real, more meaningful than her analog life ever was.
Louise is proud of her creativity. Never again will she wonder whether her work will gain acceptance. She sees it happening and realizes it’s because of her storytelling powers. Self-doubt, begone. You never hear her shouting, à la Weekend at Bernie’s, “Doesn’t anyone realize Lavinia’s dead?”
Why would they? Lavinia has become Louise’s masterpiece. In the process, Louise has reinvented herself. The former poor home girl is now a powerhouse in all the ways she ever yearned to be. When she observes, “You cannot be known and loved at the same time,” the true irony of this story is revealed. We can love (sort of) as long as we don’t know. Once we know, well, love becomes pretty hard.
Run on, Louise, run on. As long as you have skills and people have yearnings, the world is your oyster ... and pearl.
Jackie Schifalacqua is a retired jockey and current screenwriter living in Cape May.