![]() ![]() Finlay’s novel is a farcical send-up of the culture of blaggers and carpetbaggers that has become the modus operandi for seemingly every pursuer of power, from influencers to politicians, as their talents for thrusting themselves forward leave the rest of us pining for something better. ![]() As she clashes with the primly-attired Connecticut crème de la crème, her struggle to maintain the con and retain the poise of her idol Kate Moss becomes an increasing schlepp. The narrator frequently italicises all the Americanisms in her prose, overlards her vocalisations with like tonnes of likes, and sleeps with avant-garde filmmaker Diego as she is put in charge of the French translation of a new Lacan notebook (having massaged her CV with a spurious bilingual brag). The novel is a tame comedy of manners, set in a nonspecific realm of fashionable artists and eggheads. Posing as posho Lettuce Croydon-Smith, Nicki manoeuvres herself in a world of glamorous grifters and Ivy League sorority queens, in a satirical environs spiritually in sync with the offices of Quink magazine in Alexander Theroux’s harsher Laura Warholic: A Sexual Intellectual. ![]() ![]() Osing as a public-school arriviste, Nicki Smith takes a position at the soi-disant Jacques Lacan Foundation, a repository for fustians with a penchant for weak wordplay and the byzantine theories of the French theorist, second only to Derrida for impish intellectual charlatanry. The Jacques Lacan Foundation Susan Finlay Moist Books, March 2022 P ![]()
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