Boy Parts: A Novel
One of Granta's Best Young British Novelists 2023
An incendiary debut novel from a brash new talent—a pitch-black comedy, both shocking and hilarious, which fearlessly explores sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.
“Hallucinogenic, electric and sharp, Boy Parts is a whirlwind exploration of gender, class, and power.”—Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater
Exiled from the art world and on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, Irina obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, scouted from the streets of Newcastle.
But her talent has not gone unnoticed, and Irina is invited to display her work at a fashionable London gallery. It is a chance to revive her career and escape from the rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema she’s fallen into. Yet the news instead triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centered around Irina’s consuming relationship with her best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention. . . .
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Community Reviews
I'm like... am I even doing this shit? Have I even fucking done anything?
Boy Parts had an interesting premise that went nowhere. Irina is a fetish photographer who's main body of work consists on taking sexualized pictures of men she meets on the street. She is a bad woman: callous, selfish, straight up mean and unlikeable. She's also deeply traumatized and mentally ill. The thing is that at the end she was just boring, there was nothing interesting or remarkable about her. Not in the era of the mean sad girlies.
My problem with this book is that it never dared to cross the line. It could have gone farther, gone full blown American Psycho, but it always took a step back. It didn't commit fully to it. So every time it didn't go all the way it started to lose steam for me. I was waiting for something to happen. A revelation, an implosion, anything.
When the murder was revealed (or was it even real? did it even matter?) I thought to myself "oh ok these are the boy parts, alright let's gooo" but that was it. I deflated like a balloon and never recuperated. And then the ending of the book just feelt like the author couldn't think of an interesting way to wrap it all up.
I also think that the the writing is going to feel dated fast, both the writing style and the cultural references. I did enjoy some of the formatting of the text messages or the blog posts etc, but after a while I was getting quite annoyed. I don't know, maybe I don't do enough drugs to understand or like this book.
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