Boy Parts (With Spoliers)

 I have recently started reading books that were on my TBR for a while. One of them was ‘Boy Parts’ by Eliza Clark. I was intrigued by it after reading a lot of reviews talking about how shocking and interesting the novel was. It is not a long book and I have read it in a few days. However, I really just did not like this book at all. I found that it was incredibly disjointed in a way that made reading it difficult, with underdeveloped characters and no real story. While there are some shocking scenes and situations, I felt like they were added simply because of shock value, not because they are adding anything to the story overall.

‘Boy Parts’ follows Irina, a young photographer who is narrating a few days of her life, and interjecting this with stories of her past experiences. At first, I did enjoy learning more about Irina and I liked that the stories are framed through her looking through her old photographs in preparation for an exhibit in London. Irina is also specific as she now exclusively takes explicit photos of average random men she scouts from the streets. She is also an absolutely awful person with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. After a while, reading about her made me feel tired. The way she treats people around her, including her friends and family, got really old really soon. She is a good photographer, and her photos allow her to make a good living out of it, but that’s about it. As an unreliable narrator and as a character, she is simply not interesting enough for me to want to keep reading about it. This also influenced the plot for me as it relied quite heavily on the idea that Irina is so irresistible that she is always forgiven for her behaviour. 

Throughout the book, Irina talks about sexual abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, grooming in a flat tone, the same way she would talk about the weather. This was a refreshing choice, showing how much her reality is skewed and at first it was interesting. But, the more this went on, the less shocking this approach seemed to me. At the start of the novel, Irina gets punched in the face by the mother of one of her models who turned out to be a minor and this promised an interesting book. However, I found the rest of it a bit dull. I was promised a compelling criticism of the art world and commentary of the social norms, but I got none of that. Instead, I got an overly confident competent photographer roaming around through London, being shocking and awful for no apparent reason except to see how far she can push it without consequences. 

I have seen ‘Boy Parts’ be compared to ‘American Psycho’, indicating that Irina is a female Patrick Bateman, but I honestly found that comparison inaccurate. While Bret Easton Ellis used Patrick Bateman and his murders to criticise the very echelons he is a part of with his slow descent into madness, the same thing does not happen here. Irina does have hallucinations about the boy she murdered and the image of glass in people’s eyes shows up frequently throughout the book, but the breadcrumbs the author left us led pretty much nowhere. For me, there was just no depth or an underlying message or an idea of the book. I appreciate that it is much harder to write a truly transgressive work of fiction now than it was at the time ‘American Psycho’ was written and published, but I simply think that ‘Boy Parts’ falls flat when compared to ‘American Psycho’. Girlies deserve better.

The reveal of what she did came at a weird time and I did not feel like it was as surprising and shocking as the author wanted it to be. Throughout the novel, Irina, who is used to sensations of drugs, alcohol and extreme fetishes kept looking for new thrills and ways to please herself. I kept waiting for a moment in which her tower of cards fell down and the consequences caught up to her, but none happened. The ending, in which she finally lost her grip on reality, fell incredibly underwhelming. Maybe I just checked out a while ago, but it just did not scratch an itch for me. I expected a lot more from the way the novel was advertised and the build up in it. At the end, the impression was that I got nothing out of reading it. Maybe I read too many glowing reviews before reading it and raised my expectations too high, but I just wanted more.

At the end, the one word I can use to describe this novel is underwhelming. This is the author’s debut novel, so I am hoping that the next one is better. The idea is definitely there and she can write for sure, so I am definitely keeping my eye out for the next one by Eliza Clark. I rated ‘Boy Parts’ ⅖. Did you read this novel? What did you think?

source:guardian.com