It's fun to read about fabulous people. Even when they're fabulously awful. So I enjoyed Kevin Kwan's Sex and Vanity, which is as lousy with fancy folk as Kwan's first novel, Crazy Rich Asians. Like Asians, Sex and Vanity is about two soulmates separated by that age-old spoilsport, social class. Only this time, the couple isn't made up of a middle class academic and an uber upper class heir who's also an academic, but an old money miss and a nouveau riche Romeo (actually, two nouveau riche Romeos -- but who's counting?). This means that this rom com of manners is, in some ways, even more outrageously luxe than its "crazy" predecessor. Loosely based on E.M. Forster's A Room With a View, which, former English major or not, I learned only after reading the jacket, it's peppered with Kwan's signature snarky footnotes exposing the characters for their foibles, sometimes gently -- but more often than not with a skewer.
Lucie Churchill is a bio major at Brown when she meets aspiring architect George Zao in Capri at a lavish wedding. The daughter of a Chinese, Seattle-born scientist mother and a white, New York Social Register father, Lucie has always been caught between two cultures but favors the white one. So when she meets George, an idealist and flagrant flouter of convention from Hong Kong with an even more flagrantly flamboyant mother, she finds him gauche. But also, to her chagrin, irresistible. Make no mistake; George is plenty wealthy, too, albeit not the right kind of seersucker-sporting, Plymouth Rock rich. But his penchant for questioning privilege unsettles Lucie. What's more, Lucie's aversion for George flourishes under the influence of her snooty cousin Charlotte, who attends the wedding as Lucie's chaperone. Yet despite the emotional wall that she so carefully crafts, a freak accident throws Lucie literally and figuratively into George's arms, forcing her to see him in a new light and hurtling her into a sex, lies, and videotape (okay, drone) situation that ultimately thwarts her from the course she's set for herself.
Lush with luminous descriptions (even the cover flaunts fuchsia foil foliage), Sex and Vanity is one of those high style stories that makes you want to know and not know how the other half lives. Kwan is as enamored of the well-heeled as he is amused and disgusted by them. Lucie is his ambassador, an intelligent, pure-of-heart heroine who is nevertheless a product of her precious trappings. How she reacts to the obstacles that her family -- and, more to the point, she -- creates is what makes her interesting.
One last thing. Don't be fooled by the title. There isn't all that much sex in this book. Rather, the phrase "sex and vanity" is something someone says to expose someone else.
It doesn't get much more Brit lit bit witty -- or, for that matter, Kwan quippy -- than that.
