How Perfect is That
Sarah Bird
Alfred Knopf
302 pgs.

What do you do when you finally get your life back and it’s broken?

If you’re the heroine of Sarah Bird’s How Perfect is That, the self-monikered Blythe (née Chanterelle) Young, you toss back a Red Bull vodka and Dexedrine and start hustling. And Blythe Young knows hustle. At the beginning of Bird’s seventh novel, Blythe has hustled her way out of her trailer trash childhood to find success atop the Austin dot com bubble as sole proprietor of Wretched Xcess, an event-coordinator catering to the startup nouveau riche.

After the bubble bursts, she—desperate to maintain her newly attained social standing—hustles her way into a Texas blue-blood wedding, only to find herself truly down and out once the marriage disintegrates. Without friends, status, or even so much as a single vial of La Prairie Skin Caviar, and with the IRS hot on her trail, Blythe is forced to take refuge at Seneca House, the housing co-op where she lived as a UT college student in the 90’s.

Things head downhill from there.

Bird has written a tender pratfall of a book. Blythe’s gambits at times take on an I Love Lucy level of absurdity, a this-is-so-crazy-it’s-gotta-work degree of zaniness, but under the comedy is the desperation that comes from losing not just faith but all one’s moral bearings. She’s a woman on the verge of disappearing. And her female adversaries—the social crème de la crème of New Austin, who violently reject her after one of her schemes goes embarrassingly awry—are equally fragile. They’re starter wives, fearfully Working It as hard as they can and always mindful that, as Blythe notes, they started “tarnishing the minute they said ‘I do’”.

Here’s an easy question: Just how perfect is How Perfect is That, anyway? The answer: Just about totally nearly perfect, or as close as makes no nevermind.