Word: chloe
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With each revelation about the excesses of her Yalie-from-a-New-York-City-Prep-School lifestyle, Chloe blushes momentarily and then wades back into her orgy of shopping and poring over e-mails from some outpost of the male gender. Unlike Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones, whose voice is so achingly human that we forgive and even love her self-absorbed behavior, we have no real reason to like Chloe. Bridget is a modern everywoman. But the location of Chloe’s story behind ivy-covered walls mandates that a different approach be taken?...
...Chloe tells us the calorie count of everything she eats ad nauseam and she dishes the dirt on her bikini-waxing ritual, trying to let us into her body anxiety: “I grab a bag of SoyChips, chips for us carbophobes who buy into the gospel that Vogue preaches,” she tells us conspiratorially. But her descriptions of the scanty (or nonexistent) outfits in which she trots off to parties, meant to make her audience revel in the bacchanalia of college life, don’t gel with her supposed embarrassment...
Similarly, she vacillates between pride at her savvy sex-columnist rep and the mortified confession that she’s really no more experienced than the rest of the world. In order for these contrasts to work, the narrator has to be more than somewhat self-aware. Because Chloe neither fully embraces her own shallowness nor seeks to delve into its roots, the only conclusion we can draw is that her insecurity is a petulant display—more act than reality...
Chloe’s most wrenching moments don’t carry real pathos: she describes getting backstabbed by the vixen-like Veronica who has snagged Maxwell, he of the infamous Chloe-bestowed handjob. She lavishes us with the details of her angry conversation with her parents after they find out she’s writing a sex column. She even begins to doubt herself for writing said column, and has to be counseled out of crisis by her many girlfriends...
...many issues whose surfaces Chloe scratches could be rendered poignant if not tragic, but Krinsky’s approach lacks enough perspective. Disordered eating, romantic failures, sexual insecurity, the high pressure and elitism of an Ivy environment—all these problems are real. The lines outside every Ivy League school’s counseling offices are proof enough of that. And the paradigm of the young female who wants to be sexually liberated while simultaneously desperate to please the males around her is a real one—there’s a reason this genre...