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dnf. can't stand being bored, REALLY can't stand being bored by a party girl novel. nice on a prose level—and i do mean Nice, rather than good; it offers some unfussily pretty descriptions, the author is a poet (i've read and liked her poems!), it is completely formally uninteresting. what is the point of being a poet writing a novel about a year where you did a lot of drugs if you're not going to push on form at all. i guess the point is that the drugs are set dressing in the character's personality, and youth/drugs/diaspora/sex/specifically the pompous sexual mentorship from an older man are props in the big empty space where a perspective—author's or (ideally and) character's—is supposed to go.

let's think about some of the perhaps unfair high-water marks of the hot-girl-doing-nothing genre. the protagonist here doesn't have the interior complexity of elif batuman's selin, whose every thought is a surprising adventure even when she's sitting in a room. the author doesn't have the formal gift of sally rooney, generational queen of college-agers having coming-of-age sex and the readers that want to inhabit them, whose individual sentences have such a clear voice you can hear the distinctions of her characters' accents even if you aren't really up on irish regionalisms. and TRULY unfair to give it the eve babitz cover composition—i'm trying not to hold that against the author, who presumably didn't write the book imagining the cover it would one day get. but if selin (the fictional character) is a watsonian example of what's missing and sally rooney (the author) is a doylistic one, eve is both: a writer of immensely inventive turns of phrase and a hugely charismatic party girl writing from interesting lived experience. honestly mean to put them side by side.

the closest comparison is happy hour, a book that's three stars because no one in its creation was paying it particular attention, but which nonetheless has become a hit because of its gossipy vivacity. this is not alive in the same way. it's not even that it's self-impressed, even though it is in the way that all autofiction is (it feels like a very pre-dated kind of autofiction, like, very talked to death on twitter in 2021). it's... credulous about the setup of young woman fucking older man and Learning From the experience of his disinterest. it's incurious. it's formally boring. it's meant to be carried in purses and held next to a drink at bars in certain neighborhoods in certain cities to signal certain things about the media class of the reader. it is a prop. i wish it was a book.