REVIEW: ‘How Perfect Is That’ by Sarah Bird

How Per­fect Is That by Sarah Bird (June 2008), pub­lished by Knopf, is a moral­ity tale about an ex-Austin soci­ety wife try­ing to hang on des­per­ately to the life she once had of money, power, influ­ence and pam­per­ing, plenty of pam­per­ing. Her “fall” down the social lad­der isn’t pretty and my sym­pa­thy for her dimin­ished as she hit each rung of the lad­der. Here is the syn­op­sis for you:

Blythe Young—a wannabe Texas princess, a hero­ine as plucky, dri­ven, and des­per­ate as Van­ity Fair’s Becky Sharp—is plum­met­ing pre­cip­i­tously from up– to down­stairs, bang­ing her head on every step of the Austin social lad­der as she falls. Not unlike the coun­try as a whole, Blythe has sur­ren­dered to a mul­ti­tude of dubi­ous moral choices and is now fac­ing the dis­as­trous con­se­quences: bank­ruptcy, pub­lic humil­i­a­tion, a teensy fond­ness for the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, and no Pap smear for ten years. But worst of all, she is forced to move back into the fleabag co-op board­ing­house where she lived when she was a stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas.

Though Blythe cares much more about the rav­aged state of her nails, and how to get the ingre­di­ents for Code Warrior—Blythe’s pro­pri­etary blend of Stoli, Ati­van, and Red Bull that keeps every­thing in focus—her soul is hang­ing in the bal­ance. Only when she is in dan­ger of los­ing the one friend who’s been her true moral cen­ter is she ready to face her sins and make amends.

And her penance is mer­ci­less: she must find a way to lure her for­mer socialite friends into the tofu ten­e­ment she has been reduced to. Lit­tle does Blythe know that the ensu­ing col­li­sion between the pierced, tat­tooed, and dread­locked inhab­i­tants and the pam­pered, Kir-sipping socialites offers the only hope of find­ing a way out of her moral quagmire.

Blythe’s still run­ning her flag­ging cater­ing busi­ness in her old neigh­bor­hood, serv­ing what few friends she has left after the divorce. She hits rock bot­tom at a client’s gar­den party. Her staff hasn’t been paid for the last two jobs and threat­ens to revolt on her and her friend notices that the food to be catered to her guests was bought at Sam’s. The horror.

The prob­lem is that Blythe needs this job badly and doesn’t mind resort­ing to meth­ods that bor­der on crim­i­nal to achieve her goal. After the gar­den party fiasco, Blythe turns up at a board­ing house at UT, her alma mater, after being run out of the neigh­bor­hood by the IRS for tax eva­sion. Her old col­lege friend, Mol­lie, some­one she once avoided like the plaque, gives her a place to hide or stay, depend­ing on your viewpoint.

The humor­ous parts of the book dwell within the first few chap­ters where the author pokes fun at the rich and the priv­i­leged. While Blythe is a self­ish, free-loading pam­pered wannabe “Texas princess”, her friend Mol­lie is her moral con­science. A saint, really com­pared to Blythe. A good deal of the book has Blythe stay­ing with her old col­lege friend and mak­ing a pest of her­self. While read­ing, I thought: this can’t be it. What about her life? Does Blythe have any plans to do any­thing about that?

There’s a bit­ter­sweet romance with Mol­lie that is nice in a nos­tal­gic way. Much of the actions of the char­ac­ters are largely seen in a humor­ous light. In a tongue and cheek kind of way. I admit, some parts of this book was funny. Take this scene where Blythe describes her mother’s life as a sin­gle parent:

Mom couldn’t help but feel she’s been welshed on when her hus­band had a heart attack and died shortly after “the kid” was born. Mak­ing the best of a bad deal, my mother got a “shitty-ass, mon­key fuck of a job” with a phone com­pany and grudg­ingly kept me in sneak­ers and Clear­asil for the next six­teen years with peri­odic memos that this wasn’t “the tour” she had “signed on for” and that “we all got to float our own boat in this world.”

Blythe gets humil­i­ated left and right in this book but this never slows her down. I find noth­ing humor­ous about some­one who dodges respon­si­bil­ity and who is so far removed from real­ity that it’s fright­en­ing. The book is described as a “moral­ity tale” but I think that’s a mis­nomer. But you’ll have to be the judge of that because I came away from the story uncon­vinced that Blythe was ever redeemed. What­ever morals she had, she didn’t mind dis­card­ing them when it suited her.

Her rev­e­la­tion at the end about why she mar­ried her hus­band who was a pow­er­ful, Texas lob­by­ist, was treated like a big secret through­out the story. It really wasn’t a sur­prise for me as to why she mar­ried, Trey Dix, The Third.

Despite Blythe’s char­ac­ter flaws and her Walt-Disney end­ing, I’d give this book a B-. Her char­ac­ter was writ­ten to be some­what unlik­able but sym­pa­thetic. The story falls short on con­vinc­ing me on the lat­ter. Another big prob­lem was that the story slowed down a lot when the plot shifted from Blythe’s life of self-delusion to see­ing her become an annoy­ing house guest at UT.

Another issue for me was that there really wasn’t much in the way of char­ac­ter devel­op­ment or growth, which was dis­ap­point­ing. If one were to not delve too deeply beneath the sur­face you could find much to be enjoyed here. Wrap­ping this up, the first part of this novel is what I enjoyed and remem­bered best and so B– from me.

On a related note, I’ve read one other book by this author and that was The Boyfriend School. If you didn’t find that book funny, chances are you’ll not find this one funny either. It needs to be said though that Sarah Bird is a good writer of satire but again, not every­body will get her sense of humor. She is known as a writer of off beat char­ac­ters and funny sto­ries. My grade, B-.

How Per­fect Is That, is avail­able in hard­cover, $23.95 and is avail­able to pur­chase on June 10, 2008 at your favorite bookstore.