Out & About
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Those Young Lions at the New York Public Library Thursday night were certainly beautiful, but they seemed far from damned in the sense that F. Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he wrote “The Beautiful and Damned,” the book after which the party took its name.
The main character in Fitzgerald’s book, Anthony Patch, becomes an alcoholic while he waits to come into an inheritance. The guests at the library fund-raising party, on the other hand, rushed to the event from their jobs in business, fashion, and publishing, managing to costume themselves in various interpretations of 1920s glamour. And do these folks squander cash? Hardly. The night raised $250,000 for the library.
Behavior was impeccable, as far as we could see. Guests only indulged in praise for the finalists and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award, for an author under 35.
“The applause when these folks were introduced was tumultuous,” the president of the library, Paul LeClerc, said.
The award finalists were Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Kelly Link, Ander Monson, and Eric Puchner. The winner was American-born Nigerian Uzodinma Iweala, a graduate of Harvard.
If there was a damned at the party, it would have been Agu, the narrator of Mr. Iweala’s winning book, “Beasts of No Nation” (HarperCollins). Agu is a young boy separated from his family by a cruel and abusive military commander, who is transformed into a killer. The cruelty is unrelenting and conveyed in a spare and piercing language. For example: “I want to be moving, but my whole bone is paining me and my muscle is paining me like fire ant is just biting me all over my body.”
Mr. Iweala acknowledged that the subject of his novel was far from the minds of guests, who he agreed looked beautiful. Dressing as flappers and hedonists of a “lost generation” was a pleasant temporary escape from the concerns of the world. The coq au vin was a bonus.
Not that the guests aren’t planning their share of fabulous parties in the future. Lara Meiland and Claude Shaw will have an engagement party in New York with a Moulin Rouge theme before their January wedding in Switzerland.
This was a book-loving crowd so there were plenty of authors present including last year’s Fiction Award winner, Andrew Sean Greer, who wrote “The Confessions of Max Tivoli” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Alex Berenson, the author of the thriller set in Iraq published this spring, “The Faithful Spy” (Random House); Jennifer Vanderbes, author of “Easter Island” (Dial Press), and Benjamin Rudolph Delson, whose first novel will be published in 2007 by Houghton Mifflin. There was also the dashing literary agent Jennifer Joel, who felt a bit out of sorts in a blonde wig.
The fashionistas at the party included designers Peter Som and Alvin Valley; a senior vice president at Bergdorf Goodman, Linda Fargo, and fashion magazine editors galore – expected given the chairwomen of the party: designer Stacey Bendet, Vogue editor Meredith Melling Burke, fashion publicist Melissa Gellman, Vanity Fair editor Punch Hutton, and Bergdorf Goodman’s womenswear fashion director, Roopal Patel.
Commenting on how authentic people looked, the comedian Kathy Griffin said, “They’re very at home. I think these people actually keep their dresses.”
