Beautiful and damned
Natalie Standiford’s latest novel, Astrid Sees All, captures the bohemian world of New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s in acutely elegant prose. It charts the fortunes of a young suburban girl, Phoebe Hayes, in elegiac but unsentimental fashion. Phoebe longs to live in the “golden world,” as she sees it, of parties and socialites, where John-John Kennedy rubs monied shoulders with the Shah of Iran’s niece, and cocktails, champagne and cocaine flow undimmed until morning. There are hints of Gilbert Adair’s Parisian youths in The Dreamers and Jonathan Dee’s novel about the effects of great generational wealth, The Privileges.
