The Socialite Manifesto

The Socialite Manifesto: One Day in the Life of Ivana Denisovich.

 Though Christiana Spens’s new book alternates between her own input and blank pages left for the reader’s own input, it would be generous to think that such spareness invites genuine collaboration. Rather, in leaving half her pages unmarked, the author forces us to generate the narrative interest her own work neglects. Of the protagonist we are told teasingly to ‘make her [Ivana] You’ since she is in fact ‘…whoever you want her to be’, and yet the caveats present themselves almost instantly: Ivana Denisovich can be whoever you want her to be, providing she’s a distant, 18 year old, drug-abusing, sexually charged Camdenite with a troubled past. Solzhenitsyn’s everyman war prisoner she most certainly is not.

Once this pretence of open-mindedness gives way it’s hard to take Spens or her heroine seriously. By advertising Ivana’s odyssey as ‘The Socialite Manifesto’, Spens’s tone is slangy, teenage, and trying from the off. But of course the stereotyped protagonist and asinine title have nothing on the book’s actual content. Coming on like an A-Level Art coursework folder, The Socialite Manifesto takes us on a tour of its author’s most angsty drawings, frustrating the reader with caricatures so melodramatic and quips so undemanding on anything but our patience. Thus, a compromised model bears the pun ‘Let them Eat Coke’; trampling red stilettos are glossed as ‘killer heels’, while a clique of girls around a mirror are explained, somewhat self-referentially, as ‘Boring, Boring Boring…’

Spens does, however, treat us to the occasional flicker of insight. ‘Nosebleed in New York’ proves particularly fertile: a fragile sketch flecked with some at least well-meant poetry, the piece showcases another tawny starlet, nosebleed spraying suggestively onto her mouth to become lipstick. The way Spens melds images of violence and glamour here is tender yet cutting, not to mention the closest she comes to making a thought-provoking point. Nevertheless, this highpoint is a rare one and its relevance to Ivana’s journey also somewhat uncertain.

In the conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, Marx urged the workers of the world that they had ‘…nothing to lose but your chains’; all Spens’s readers have to lose, this manifesto suggests, is their £12.99. 

Originally published in Varsity