Eliot Schrefer’s debut novel, Glamorous Disasters, follows the social climb and fall–okay, stumble–of Noah, an SAT tutor hired by various prestigious and wealthy New York City families to insure their children’s success in life–or to help them beat the SAT. Whatever. The novel centers around Noah’s work with the “troubled” (read: spoiled and neglected) Thayer children, Dylan and Tuscany, who are both one party away from complete disaster. Thus the title, I suppose.
Schrefer’s novel has been compared to both Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth and Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus’ The Nanny Diaries; neither comparison works for me. The Nanny Diaries relies heavily on the near-anonymity of the protagonist; we know just enough about Nanny Drew to sympathize with her as she struggles to do her job under increasingly bad and bizarre conditions. Her ethical struggle is clear: leaving her job means leaving her four-year-old charge with no one to love him, which is unconscionable. Schrefer tries to recreate this same type of relationship between Noah and his students, but it is difficult to believe that two hours a week of tutoring could result in the same bond (particularly since Dylan spends his entire tutoring sessions IMing and text messaging his friends). Additionally, Schrefer allows us to see Noah thinking about his sexual attraction to fifteen-year-old Tuscany, which frankly just made me like him even less. We are told, over and over, that Noah feels torn between his small-town Virginia roots and the Upper East side word that his Princeton alum friends inhabit, but this tension seems more like a staple of the genre rather than a true character trait.
But if Noah is no Nanny Drew he is even less Wharton’s Lilly Bart. Schrefer wants us to feel that Noah’s dilemmas are not of his own making, that he is overpowered by the world of his wealthy students and their immoral parents, but at every turn we see Noah making bad choices and then flinching when the consequences come around. He is sitting on a dark secret, about a former student and the lengths to which he was willing to go in his devotion for her, and this comes back to haunt him–but frankly it’s his own fault. And, of course, unlike Lilly Bart, who was constrained–and, ultimately, destroyed–by her gender and the rules of society, Noah has other options for repayment of his massive student loans. He could get a real job, for example. Or he could just stop getting over-involved in his students’ lives and tutor them, rather than trying to save them. Either way, this is a disaster of his own making.
In large part, this novel fails because the characters are both entirely one-dimensional and entirely unsympathetic. Noah’s students are alternately pampered and ignored by both their parents and their tutor, but unlike The Nanny Diaries‘ Greyer X, we just don’t give a damn about them. The Thayer kids, with their drugs and parties and lackadaisical attitude toward anything of relevance in the world, are clearly past redemption, or they are on their own, self-determined road to redemption–there is nothing that Noah can do that will change that, and all his whining about needing to help them is just that: whiny. Little Greyer, on the other hand, is a child, and we are drawn in by the hope that maybe Nanny can compensate for his parents neglect and stupidity adn stop him from growing up to be, for example, Dylan Thayer. While The Nanny Diaries tugs at our heartstrings, Glamorous Disasters only irritates; in the end, small children are sympathetic while slutty, druggie teenagers just aren’t.
Finally, Glamorous Disasters has the dubious distinction of including–on page six–what is arguably the worst line ever written: “His hair looks like he has just taken a nap, or been licked by a goat.” I don’t have any idea what that image–of Dylan Thayer looking like he has been accosted by a farm animal–has to do with anything else in this novel. Unfortunately, Schrefer often tries to make up for any sense of depth in his narrative with turns of phrase like this one. In the end, the only disaster in this novel was the novel itself.
