The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty: A Novel

by Amanda Filipacchi

Overview

"A sure comic touch . . . smart and sweet . . . a tribute to the pleasures of friendship." —The New Yorker

In the heart of New York City, a group of artistic friends struggles with society's standards of beauty. At the center are Barb and Lily, two women at opposite ends of the beauty spectrum, but with the same problem: each fears she will never find a love that can overcome her looks. Barb, a stunningly beautiful costume designer, makes herself ugly in hopes of finding true love. Meanwhile, her friend Lily, a brilliantly talented but plain-looking musician, goes to fantastic lengths to attract the man who has rejected her—with results that are as touching as they are transformative.

To complicate matters, Barb and Lily discover that they may have a murderer in their midst, that Barb’s calm disposition is more dangerously provocative than her beauty ever was, and that Lily's musical talents are more powerful than anyone could have imagined. Part literary whodunit, part surrealist farce, The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a smart, modern-day fairy tale. With biting wit and offbeat charm, Amanda Filipacchi illuminates the labyrinthine relationship between beauty, desire, and identity, asking at every turn: what does it truly mean to allow oneself to be seen?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393352306
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/22/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	279,471
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Amanda Filipacchi is the author of three previous novels, Nude Men, Vapor, and, most recently, Love Creeps. Her writing has appeared in Best American Humor and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Amanda Filipacchi writes with a deceptive ease, creating magic out of thin air. She makes the ordinary come alive with possibility and stuffs her pages full of laughter, sadness and characters that are unforgettable.

Neil La Bute

A seductively powerful fable about the ugly powers of beauty, the redemptive powers of creativity, and the nature of true love. Every page abounds in mystery, delight and surprise.

Sheila Heti

The best comic novelist writing today.

Ed Park

A delightful gem, an unusual mixture of laughter and suspense.

Jonathan Ames

A delight for the mind that penetrates the heart.

Walter Kirn

The funniest novelist you’ve never heard of. . . .  Few comic novelists get characters talking so naturally, and amusingly.

John Freeman - Boston Globe

Readers who’d like to spend a little time at the corner where a brisker Haruki Murakami meets a drier ‘30 Rock’ would do well to seek out Filipacchi’s radiantly intelligent and very funny novel.

Ellis Avery - San Francisco Chronicle

A surreal and utterly compelling triumph.

Buzzfeed

[A] farcical novel . . . riveting to read.

Nathan Reese - New York Times T Magazine

Funny, surreal, absurd and charmingly preposterous.

Sarah Lyall - New York Times Book Review

Magic spills from the pores of Filipacchi’s story. . . .  The resulting romp is a witty and honest rendering of the unknowable distance between perception and reality, exploring the possibility that beauty is literally in the eyes of the beholder.

Alexandra Coakley - Slate

[A] zanily satirical, spot-on novel.

Leigh Haber - O

Takes a fairy tale, flips it on its head, and adds an element of murder . . . will both make you laugh and keep you on the edge of your seat.

Lynsey Eidell - Glamour

Loopily entertaining.

Joanna Scutts - Washington Post

Filipacchi's lively story reflects on the unearned power that beauty confers on its recipients . . . breezy with a bite.

Maureen Corrigan - NPR

11/17/2014
Filipacchi’s fourth novel blithely upends the social constructs of beauty, desire, and art in her signature brisk, darkly comic style. As usual, Filipacchi taps the sleaze at its source: Manhattan. The focus is on a successful costumer designer named Barb and her group of artsy friends, the Knights of Creation: Georgia, a bestselling novelist; Lily, a talented pianist; beautiful socialite and would-be potter Penelope, who was once kidnapped; and Penelope’s rescuer, ex-cop Jack. The fractured fairy tale of a plot turns on narrator Barb, who inherited her supermodel mother’s jaw-dropping looks but has dressed in an elaborate disguise since she learned that her beauty drove her friend Gabriel to suicide, and Lily, whose face is “simply extremely ugly—the kind of ugliness that is inoperable,” and who yearns to write a piece of music that will hypnotize her longtime crush, a bro-ish violinist named Strad. Filipacchi (Love Creeps) succeeds by loading this frothy plot with sharp surreal turns and layers of subversive meaning as Georgia’s lost laptop mysteriously reappears, Lily’s melodious powers of persuasion become supernaturally effective, and Gabriel warns in a postmortem letter to Barb that one of the Knights intends to kill Strad. The author’s own mother, model Sondra Peterson, even makes a cameo, but while looks can kill, they’re no match for Filipacchi’s rapier wit. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Part murder mystery, part satire, part meditation, Ms. Filipacchi’s book has also been called a modern fairy tale.

Laren Stover - New York Observer

Filipacchi’s fourth [novel], is a critique of how society’s visual valuations override the importance of character: a ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ manifesto.

The Daily Beast

An astute, piercing look at the value society and individuals place on appearance… impossible to put down and utterly dead-on in its assessment of human nature.

starred review Booklist

So funny, so farcical, and its characters so engaging that I couldn’t stop reading.

KJ DellAntonia - The New York Times

Amanda Filipacchi’s untamed imagination makes the world a little more fun to live in. This witty novel shines a blacklight on beauty, to reveal its dark side, and the author’s irrepressibly zany one.

Roxana Robinson

Filipacchi's lively story reflects on the unearned power that beauty confers on its recipients… breezy with a bite.

Maureen Corrigan - NPR Books

[A] farcical novel… riveting to read.

Nathan Reese - T Magazine

[A] sure comic touch… smart and sweet… a tribute to the pleasures of friendship.

The New Yorker

[A] zanily satirical, spot-on novel.

The Oprah Magazine O

An incisive look at beauty and its skewed place in our society, through the lens of Voltaire-like farce and fantasy.

Autumn Markus - New York Journal of Books

[A] darkly humorous modern fairy tale.

Claire Fallon - Huffington Post

03/01/2015
Filipacchi's (Love Creeps) absurdist fourth novel requires a reader who is willing to suspend disbelief, so let's accept the ridiculous premise and dive in. Barb the beautiful lives in a fat suit and wears the most inappropriate clothes and a ratty gray wig because she must protect the world from her loveliness. Ugliness is a mask she regularly discards in bars to prove that men are obsessed with beauty. Lily, the truly ugly one, is obsessed with Strad, who isn't afraid to say he can only love beautiful women. Lily will do anything to get Strad to love her and, with Barb's help, she succeeds. Lily, a pianist, composes a song that makes her beautiful—but only while it's playing. Barb designs a mask for Lily, which, in combination with the beauty song, is used to seduce Strad. And it works until Lily decides she can't hide behind the mask any longer. There is also a murder plot, magic realism, and a love story for Barb. VERDICT While some of Filipacchi's gags stray into eye-rolling territory and her message about the role of beauty in our culture manages to be both heavy-handed and superficial, the novel has its moments. The successful reader will embrace the over-the-top set pieces and roll with it.—Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Library Journal

2014-11-20
Another surreal, dark comedy from Filipacchi (Love Creeps, 2005, etc.).Costume designer Barb is so gorgeous her friend Gabriel kills himself for unrequited love of her, after which she dresses in a fat suit, gray wig and false teeth so no one else will be harmed by her looks and she can find a man who loves the inner Barb. Brilliantly gifted composer Lily is so plain that shallow Strad doesn't even notice her adoration. Both women get together once or twice a week for a Night of Creation with successful novelist Georgia, untalented potter Penelope, and Jack, the former cop who rescued Penelope when she was kidnapped six years earlier. The atmosphere is rarefied verging on pretentious, an impression reinforced by the affected tone of the narration and the highly improbable arrival of two posthumous letters from Gabriel revealing that one of the five told him that he or she would kill Strad on a particular date if he hadn't fallen in love with Lily by then. Among the other elements in an exceedingly busy plot: Anchorman Peter Marrick maneuvers to meet Barb after learning about her ugly disguise when he finds the laptop Georgia left in a taxi. Lily acquires the ability to make things beautiful by composing music about them, which of course she eventually uses to transform herself for Strad. And a bizarrely rude doorman makes multiple appearances that are finally justified by the violent climax that rebeautifies Barb and brings Lily destruction followed by the media's remorseful reappraisal of the premium placed on good looks. The novel is more than a little over-the-top, and the characters have more attitude than personality. Still, there's something weirdly compelling about the whole excessive parade, and most people will keep reading just to find out how all the elaborate manipulations turn out. Contrived, to put it mildly, but an unsettling portrait of the way extreme physical beauty or ugliness distort people's impressions.

Kirkus Reviews

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