TO BUY · 09/28/2015
Books We Love: You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Now *that’s* how you title a novel!
Alexandra Kleeman’s first novel has an unambiguously excellent title: You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. The title is great in a few ways. One, it precisely summarizes the book’s themes (embodiment, consumption of all kinds, commercial exhortation of all kinds). Two, it transcends those themes. Three, the title’s direct-address reaches out and grabs a reader by the collar and shakes that collar with determination, which also happens to be how Kleeman’s prose functions.
The novel centers around two girls with twinlike qualities, and a boyfriend who is adjacent to one of the girls, and a cult and a grocery store. It has an atmosphere of ambivalent dread that might remind you of Don DeLillo’s great White Noise. A few other DeLillo-ish refrains appear in the novel, too: an obsession with TV commercials, a close-reading of supermarkets, a crafty wit, and an interest in the various odd ways that humans love and mimic each other.
The author lives in New York, is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, writes for places like n+1 and enjoys covering the Ronettes. What’s not to love.