The Clasp by Sloane Crosley - book review: Razor-sharp wit skewers world of New York's rich

Old college friends, about to turn 30 and each facing the fact that their lives haven't turned out as anticipated, are reunited at a wealthy mutual friend's wedding

The American publicist-turned-writer Sloane Crosley's debut novel showcases much of the same razor-sharp wit as her New York Times bestselling essay collections I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number. “Oh, to have two incomes in one home,” muses Keiza, one of the novel's three central characters, as she wanders round a friend and her husband's Upper West Side apartment admiring their closet “just for coats” compared to her own lack of cupboard space, period.

There was no guarantee that Crosley's humour – keen-eyed, sometimes verging on mean-eyed, observations of the people and world around her – would successfully survive the transition to fiction, but she nails it. From an unbearable monster of a jewellery designer whose success hinges on her “commitment” to an Annie Hall aesthetic: “Because, actually, a lot of people wanted to live in Annie Hall. They simply lacked the mental fortitude to maintain the fantasy when not within 10 yards of the movie.” To rich people with their “thing” for outdoor showers: “Only people safe in the knowledge that their moments of roughing it are fake and their moments of comfort are real get a kick out of standing on a rock and fiddling with a corroded knob.”

While Crosley's principal trio – Keiza, dogsbody for aforementioned jewellery designer; Victor, newly unemployed; and Nathaniel, an aspiring TV writer – aren't part of this cedar-and-flagstone gilded world, they exist on its periphery. Old college friends, about to turn 30 and each facing the fact that their lives haven't turned out as anticipated, they're reunited at a wealthy mutual friend's wedding.

Throw in the nostalgia-fuelled sexual tension of a nearly complete unrequited love triangle – Victor loves Keiza; Keiza loves Nathaniel; and Nathaniel loves himself – pointed portraits of place (Los Angeles, for example, as a “sleeping python” ready to strike), not to mention Americans in Europe, and in Crosley's nimble hands you've already got the makings of a comic quarter-life crisis novel more entertaining than most.

But she ups the ante by incorporating Guy de Maupassant's short story The Necklace into as many layers of its fabric as possible. Cautionary tale, plot device, something for a character to read on a plane; it ticks all the boxes. The twist in de Maupassant's tale is that the titular trinket is fake; The Clasp, on the other hand, proves that Crosley's talent is very real.

Hutchinson £12.99. Order for £10.99 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030