Boy Parts

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For an author whose entire online presence is built on wokeness (I found this book through her Guardian interview and then her twitter) there’s some problematic shit in here. I’m relatively new to good reads and thought this was a safe space to share my reviews (not many of my friends read and was hoping to find community here), I didn’t expect to be publicly mocked for it. Or the other way around, I think they’re funny and then someone else reads them and is like, ‘This is fucking horrible.

Highly recommend and understand the hype, but just a heads up, this is definitely one of those, “no plot just vibes”, books. Speaking of Tarantino if you thought that Uma Thurman's character in that or Kill Bill have some merit…well, you might like Boy Parts after all. This shakes you around like a rag doll and you love it as you begin to see Boy Parts as your dominant partner and while you are going to get pleasure you are also going to get pain. The sections written as text messages are amusing as well, with drunk misspellings or autocorrect mistakes that felt true to life. Clark is interested in the way people treat others better when they are dressed nicely or are conventionally good-looking, and how that manifests, “even casual things like getting free stuff at Pret”.

Yet for all the power Irina exhibits over others, there is still the aspect of a patriarchal society she works within and how dangerous it is for women.

No matter how good she may be,” adds Greer, “she just can’t outrun other people’s perceptions of her. and to ‘merely’ think the other two as to say them out loud in front of someone who is not white, and who she had identified as ‘sensitive’, and risk that he would see her for who she truly was. The writing changes slightly, but not in a believably organic way that reflects the main character’s spiralling mental health. We get to read as she goes through these strange and obsessive behaviors and falls into this downward spiral into madness. but I think that's maybe just because if you tend towards them, you tend to keep a place in your heart for all of them.

from here, we see glimpses of her past in fleeting hallucinatory and hazy flashbacks where there is no definitive line between imagination and reality. When she’s offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery which promises to revive her career in the art world, it should feel like an escape.

Maybe if this book had come out in the 80s, I would be more inclined to forgive or accept its many shortcomings, but since it was published in 2020 I have a harder time reconciling myself with its unimaginative and superficial exploration of female sexuality, the male gaze, and female rage. It seemed that the story didn’t really know what kind of character it wanted us to read about so it went all over the place. the boyfriend she had when we first met was this nme-cut-out, landfill-indie looking cunt with a porkpie hat and a huge fringe. boy parts follows irina, a photographer who takes fetishistic and explicit photos of men she scouts as her models.This is all to say that Irina being a stronza who engages in ‘bad’ behaviour, is not why I didn’t like this book. Not as tense or edgy as it thinks it is, this takes an inordinately long time to become interesting, but only then in a sub-American Psycho homage.

She recently wrote on Twitter: “a good thing about me is that you can enjoy my book without finding out that i went to oxbridge and my parents are both famous journalists like 6 months later and feeling somewhat betrayed.I also didn't really like the dialogue which I thought was formatted a little weird and maybe could have been a little more realistic? there are figurines on his windowsill, and he has that akira poster that everyone has, as well as a bruce lee poster, and a bunch of pictures of some idol girl group. She captures dialogue and regional accents as if she bottled it up from the air and pinned it to the page where, still fresh and alive, it squirms in discomfort as much as the reader.