- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (Jun 3 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0743226852
- ISBN-13: 978-0743226851
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16.5 x 2.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 590 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,164,848 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Gigi Levangie Grazer has written one previous novel (Rescue Me), helped pen the screenplay for Stepmom, and, not least, is married to Hollywood uber-producer Brian Grazer (he of the wacky hair and the not-so-wacky partnership with Ron Howard). At first glance, Mrs. Grazer appears to be a complete parvenu as a novelist. Maneater rips off every girl-power/shopaholic source from early Tama Janowitz right up to Sex and the City. Her prose can be ungrammatical, her plot hopelessly predictable, and her characters paper-thin. But Grazer has a secret weapon: her preternaturally acid powers of observation. When she writes about the freaky mores of Hollywood, the book exerts an irresistible pull. Thirtyish LA It girl Clarissa Alpert reflects on her shallow, jobless, mateless (but fabulous!) life, and decides it's high time she was married. She and her four best friends (hello, Sarah Jessica Parker and company) hatch a plan to snag the cutest, hottest young producer in town. What ensues is hardly new territory, but the book is enlivened by Grazer's amazing ability to nail down pop culture ephemera. To wit: "Clarissa was sentimental--she liked saving messages from old friends and C-level celebrities. She had an answering tape collection that dated all the way back to babydoll dresses, sparkle dust and Hole." Her eye for detail--and her refusal ever to make Clarissa lovable, or even likable--make Maneater a hypnotic read. This is fiction-as-gigantic-chocolate-bar. Halfway through, you feel a little off color, but there's no way you're going to stop. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
Masquerading as chick lit, this pitch-black comedy by Grazer (Rescue Me) is actually a scathing satire of L.A. society (to use the term loosely). Clarissa Alpert is 31-admitting-to-28, wears only Gucci and Prada, greets friend and foe alike with "a triple-cheek air kiss" and "had slept her way, without mercy, regret, mourning or conscience, through Greater Los Angeles." Her four best friends, less clever than she but equally venal, agree that Clarissa is the valedictorian of men. Among them, love is rare, but sex is plentiful and organized into a precise taxonomy that includes the "Curiosity Fuck," the "Boredom Fuck" and more. But lately Clarissa has decided that it's time to get married. Fortuitously, film-school grad and would-be producer Aaron Mason appears in her life. He's wearing cowboy boots (ugh), but driving a Bentley (her favorite car to be seen in); he's a foreigner (anyone born between California and New York is foreign), but the heir to a department store fortune. After her first sighting of him, Clarissa reserves the hotel and the florist and selects her Vera Wang wedding gown. Her divorced parents-amiable, chick-chasing father and "brittle-boned, anorexic, four-pack-a-day smoker Jewish mother"-bring their own demented enthusiasms to the matrimonial pursuit. In due course, the fanciest wedding of the season takes place despite the bride's refusal to sign a pre-nup. But this is only one-third of the way through the book, and as you might imagine, Clarissa doesn't quite live happily ever after. A true antiheroine, Clarissa, like the rest of the cast, is unapologetically loathsome. In lesser hands she would be merely irritating, but Grazer gives Clarissa just enough intelligence and spark to make her shameless antics deliciously entertaining.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
My God, the wedding was beautiful. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
My God, the wedding was beautiful. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fun satire of a Beverly Hills socialite (3 1/2 stars)...,
This review is from: Maneater (Paperback)
Maneater is a fun, satirical novel about a Beverly Hills socialite looking for Mr. Right -- or rather, looking for Mr. Rich. Clarissa has everything a jetsetter and party sweetheart should have: an enviable designer wardrobe, a trendy apartment and friends she can talk to and criticize behind their backs. But Clarissa is now thirty (though she tells everyone she's twenty-eight) and must find her future husband pronto. Aaron Mason is the ideal dream boat. He's the hottest producer in town and a confirmed bachelor. Clarissa thinks she has him right where she wants him, but then her ex-boyfriend resurfaces and complicates things...I thought this novel was very funny. I even ignored the fact that the author is a well-connected Hollywood screenwriter. Well... she seems to know a lot about the L.A. scene and satirizes it in a low-brow, clever way. Clarissa and her equally superficial friends irritated me at times, but then again the aforementioned characters aren't supposed to be enchanting. I couldn't help but think of the story and its female characters as a parodied imitation of Sex and the City. This is an entertaining, darkly funny chick-lit novel and I recommend it as a no-fuss summer read.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Terrible,
By A Customer
This review is from: Maneater (Hardcover)
I won't waste your time by paraphrasing the plotline of this awful book, I think everyone else who's reviewed it has summed it up well. In a word, I thought this book was terrible. Levangie Granger spent so much time creating Clarissa, a super-fake, unlikeable, shallow, generally awful character in the first half of the book that I didn't believe that Clarissa could change her tune and actually experience real emotions. By the time Clarissa started acting more like a human being and (a bit) less like a soul-less west coast chick from HELL (which she kind of remained all the way to the end), I didn't care what happened to her anymore. I actually started wishing something terrible would happen to her (car crash... train wreck... struck by lightening...). Unfortunately, when it did (her mother's death; her anorexic mother -- another somewhat unbelieveable character -- was described by the author as having "shat herself to death" -- could you be more vile?) I really didn't give a damn about stupid old Clarissa. I'm as fascinated by the glamorous, glitzy life of Beverly Hills socialites as the next middle class gal... but maybe not as much as I was before I read this book. Thankfully it's fiction, and even though I'm from the great nowhere between New York and Los Angeles, I refuse to believe that this is an accurate snapshot of how women in Clarissa's social position are. At least I can hope it's not. Hey -- and did anyone catch that Clarissa put her cat, which she only had to match her sofa, in a bag and forgot to take her out when she moved back in with her mother??? I assumed that the cat died due to Clarissa's negligence. Was that supposed to be cute? I don't think animal abuse is very cute. Yet another gross and unforgiveable aspect of Clarissa Alpert. I think this book was intended to be kind of a funny, lighthearted romp. I even think that the author probably intended to make the characters so extreme that they became rather cartoonish. All well and good, but I think Levangie Granger does women a real disservice. Women in this book were either: 1. manipulative, deceptive, shallow bitches, obsessed with "product" and sleeping their way up the social ladder (which Clarissa and her friends shameless and dangerously DID), or 2. not that way, and therefore dumb. Fortunately I don't think this book was that popular and I only picked it out as something to read between more serious work-related books, so maybe not a lot of people will read it, and hopefully fewer will be at all influenced by it.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Just a bit too trendy,
This review is from: Maneater (Hardcover)
Thirty-something (she's perennially 28) Clarissa Alpert has no job, no mate, but fabulous shoes and friends! However, Clarissa decides it's getting time for her to catch herself a man to settle down with and sets her sights on Aaron Mason, the latest, hottest new producer in town. With the help of her four friends (one who seems like a Paris Hilton copy(...)) Clarissa starts to plan the wedding of her dreams, before the couple even has a first date! Clarissa gets what Clarissa wants, so landing Aaron shouldn't be a problem...should it? Clarissa does get a bit on the nerves occasionally, and sometimes all the trendy nods in the book makes it feel like it will be quickly dated. However, it was mostly a fun read, since Clarissa is quite the unpredictable character!
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