The narrative is driven forward by the show that Irina is part of at a gallery in London. Dead-end jobs and failed creative ventures ensue but the drug use and alcohol consumption remain.

The party is still going on but the exists are slowly being boarded up. What begins as an analysis of a tortured soul soon slips into a contemporary gangbanging of post-student culture. While Clark trumps gender tropes by exceling the strong female character prototype with one whose power and control comes from her own emotional sensitivity, it overshadows the other characters in the book who are swimming in anxiety, indecision, and hopelessness.Ĭlark’s book is a modern-day American Psycho but also borrows from Ellis’s earlier novel Rules of Attraction which details the drug abuse, sex and trivialities of young adults. Uncontrollable, she blunders through life abusing friends, family, and acquaintances (more often than not her models who fall head over heels in love with her.) Instead of a piano to lean on she leans on her camera. Instead, Irina is not only sexy, destructive, and seductive but mean, inconsolable and murderous. This femme fatale is unlike the traditional, she is no Ava Gardner in The Killers. The private sales of her artworks show that she is a success but there are far more sinister motivations to her method.Įliza Clark, in her debut, deals with pathetic boys who pander and beg at the feet of the protagonist and in doing so a femme fatale is created. Her erotic photographs which invert the male gaze and portray masculine fragility. She was a promising art student who straddles the boundaries between the niche and the obscene only to find an obscene niche.

She drifts through obscurity and emotional prosperity which declines as the pages are turned. Much is begrudged by Irina, the heroine of this book, and much is let slide.

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark