Book Review: Private Lives by Tasmina Perry

If there’s one thing that chick lit is highly successful at, it’s at making you value the fact that your fellow is quite the catch indeed, and that your friends are just that–friends, rather than ultra-catty femme fatales full of more venom than a king brown. Chick lit, after all, is all about dissecting the goings on of the uber-competitive industries of marketing, fashion, or law (invariably in London or New York), and about doing quite the hatchet job on both sexes at the same time.

When it’s done poorly, you’ll find yourself shivering on the couch wondering whether the world is indeed against you–and perhaps reaching for a bottle of gin. But when it’s done well you’ll find yourself rubbing that rose-tinted sheen from your sunnies and filled with the sudden urge to embrace all the lovely folk around you. Oh, lovely fiance, you aren’t a scumbag Hollywood movie star who cheats on me, fellow Hollywood movie star, with some Titian harlot. Oh, dear sister, you won’t run off with my man and pretend that our parents had nothing to do with your television success. Oh, best friend, I have nothing to fear from your stiletto heels and camera phone. Oh, former boss, you’re–

Let’s leave it there before I get too fanciful, shall we?

Anyway, needless to say, most of the above scenarios, and all manner of additional superbly rendered excess manage to pack their way into Tasmina Perry’s latest novel Private Lives, which follows a fairly similar thematic path to her previous novel Kiss Heaven Goodbye (see my review). And like Kiss Heaven Goodbye, it’s really rather good indeed. When it comes to sordid plots and gasp-worthy shenanigans, Perry wields her pen (Macbook?) like some sort of medieval torture device, and comes up with some brutal stuff indeed. Private Lives, though running at a good 500 or so pages, is exactly the sort of book that sits so beautifully under the Read in a Single Sitting remit–you can’t put it down even though your elbows are aching from the strain of holding it up for some several hours.

Private Lives is at its heart an examination of the increasingly narrow division between the private and public elements of our existence, and how this brittle separation can be so readily manipulated by the media or really by just about anyone in the know to get across a particular agenda or to, perhaps, bury something plausibly newsworthy.

Film star Sam Carr is used to the paparazzi’s intrusion into his personal life, is used to his fans’ expectations that they be able to get to know him. He’s used to projecting a particular face to the world through careful interview responses, efforts to kiss babies and help old ladies, and even a strained engagement with a an up-and-coming Hollywood starlet. But Sam obviously isn’t used to holding his booze, because one night he slips up (or, er, out?) and finds himself in bed with a young lass who’s definitely not his fiance.

Media laywer Anna Kennedy isn’t surprised when Sam Carr comes a-calling. As one of the top privacy and media legal eagles in the biz, she’s buried more skeletons than a gravedigger, and sets things rolling so that Sam’s indiscretion will find itself buried deeper than an igneous rock. But Anna’s watertight case is somehow overturned, spelling disaster not just for Sam’s career, but Anna’s as well. Anna, after all, is new at the powerhouse Donovan and Price, and Helen Price is gleefully circling like a hungry vulture with a case of schadenfreude. Anna, however, knows her stuff, and she knows that she hasn’t done anything wrong. Someone has been meddling–but who, how, and why she has no idea. That is, until she hears rumours of a young socialite’s suspicious death and the astonishingly well-connected list of suspects.

Perry does a formidable job of getting and keeping things rolling, and you’ll find those pages turning like pancakes flipped by an energetic child (goodness, and I thought my previous similes were bad…don’t hate me). Sure, on its glossy surface this novel seems to be simply a scatty novel about power plays and overly structured tailored work suits, but at its heart it’s a very well done mystery with a cast list it’s hard not to fall for. There are the requisite Hollywood dolts whose lives are all about no-carb diets and Botox, the greasy, sleazy paps with their rumbling sports cars, and a whole bunch of lawyers who would make bloody good Dementors, but these archetypes give Perry a background against which she successfully builds her main characters, and also allow Perry to inject just the right amount of humour into this novel, and given the surprisingly dark subject matter we come across as the novel progresses, these moments of levity are essential–although some are ridiculously over-the-top even for Hollywood: do we really need a faked pregnancy? As noted, on the whole her main characters are quite nuanced, with Anna in particular being well-rounded and believable. Sam’s character, however, doesn’t quite get the same thorough treatment that Anna does, and he continues to come off as a bit of a spurious man-child for most of the novel (This seems to be an ongoing trend in chick lit, I have to say: the men tend not to be as well-rounded as the female characters).

While we get our fair share of romantic shenanigans, glass ceiling bashing, and (private) jetsetting about to all sorts of beautiful locations–Capri and Kerala just to name a few–Private Lives is a thoughtful exploration of the effect of the ubiquitous media and the systemic changes to our perceptions of privacy. In addition to that, it looks rather seriously at the idea that the story that we’re being told is perhaps not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And when you think about the homogeneity of the media these days, as well as the shared and overlapping interests of those involved…well, that’s a rather eerie thought indeed.

In all, Tasmina Perry hits it out of the park with a novel that hits all of the chick lit boxes and then some. It’s fun but not necessarily fluffy, it’s witty without being too cutting, and it has a love story without being a love story. Yes, it’s about the privileged set, but in a way that’s intelligently critical, and while the final reveal is a little bit rickety, the mystery overall is solid and well-paced. Take it to the beach (but make sure that you’re wearing something that won’t get you embroiled in a privacy lawsuit).

Rating: (excellent)