Jessica Joffe
When Nell Freudenberger debuted in the pages of the New Yorker in the summer of 2001, the New York literary community responded less to the short story she’d managed to write so much more adeptly than her “Début Fiction” comrades of that year than to the accompanying author photograph, a simple but misguided portrait of a twenty-six-year-old girl staring doe-eyed up at a camera from a curiously vast and purple bed. The reaction was summed up in Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2003 essay for Salon, which offered the riveting thesis that she was simply “too young, too pretty, too successful” and took I honestly believe that 1/2 the people who read about the Mitfords are motivated to do so by a kind of fierce jealousy which drives them where they do not want to go. —Diana Mitford to Deborah Mitford, May 13, 1985 Several years ago, Charlotte Mosley found herself at lunch with her mother-in-law, Diana Mosley (née Mitford). Grumbling about the latest request by an outsider to illuminate yet another aspect of Mitford life, Diana looked at her youngest son, Max, and her daughter-in-law and said: “Why don’t one of you do something for a change?” Perhaps forgetting that Jonathan When, on February 6, New York’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner finally announced that “Mr. Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam, and doxylamine . . . [and] that the manner of death is an accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications,” […] Book of Clouds arrives coated in the sort of effusive blurbs conspicuous only when absent from a first novel’s jacket these days. It takes place in twenty-first-century Berlin, a city many have tried to capture with words, brushstrokes, and various shutter speeds, but one ignored by many of its residents in favor of their own misguided hopes and dreams. There the book follows Tatiana, the alter ego of the author, Chloe Aridjis, as she floats through life aimlessly, with a taste for ennui and slipshod metaphor. Very little happens to Tatiana/Chloe, whose defining characteristics are that she is Mexican (the