62 pages • 2 hours read
Janelle BrownPretty Things
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: False Identities and Grifting in Literature
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of suicide.
Nina and Vanessa use the internet to create alternate identities. The allure of being another person or multiple people predates social media and the internet and is present throughout literature. The controversial 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud declared that he could be someone else or an object (Rimbaud, Arthur. “Extract from the ‘Voyant’ Letter.” Poetry in Translation, 2008). As such, people have been able to imagine themselves as other, “prettier” things long before social media. The 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman routinely spoke of the multiple identities in his body (Whitman, Walt. “I Sing the Body Electric.” The Portable Walt Whitman. Penguin, 1977). Minus social media, neither Whitman nor Rimbaud could commodify their multiple selves or immediately display them to an audience. Dramatizing and commodifying a personal life occurs in Oscar Wilde’s satirical play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In the satire, Cecily, a character from well-off London society, intends to publish her diary, and another well-off character, Gwendolen, likes to reread her captivating diary on the train. Cecily and Gwendolen write in their diaries with an audience in mind, just as Vanessa posts on social media with her audience in mind. In real life, American poet Robert Lowell controversially used personal letters from his ex-wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection The Dolphin (1973).
Novels about grifting and conning include Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). Like Nina, the antihero, Tom Ripley, schemes his way into the lives of the rich. In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), Flynn, like Janelle Brown, uses alternate narrators to show how Amy Dunne tricks her unfaithful husband into believing she is the victim of a kidnapping. In her novel Cover Story (2022), Susan Rigetti constructs a grifting narrative that, like Brown’s novel, brings together two women from different socioeconomic classes.
Literary Context: References to Other Literary Works
Pretty Things references several novels that tie the story to classic literature. Nina reads Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-61), and, like Pip, Nina discovers how unfair reality can be. On Instagram, Vanessa poses with Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Similar to Vanessa’s mom, the titular heroine in Tolstoy’s novel dies by suicide due to an affair. In the Victorian Gothic novel Wuthering Heights, the wealthy estate Thrushcross Grange becomes a source of pain and trauma—connecting it to Stonehaven. Heathcliff, the brutal romantic interest/villain, informs aspects of Lachlan’s cruel character. Vanessa’s mom, Judith, mentions another Victorian Gothic novel, Jane Eyre (1847), by Emily’s sister, Charlotte Brontë, in which the titular character has to overcome poverty and a seemingly haunted estate.
Cultural Context: Social Media and Deception
Nina tracks rich people on social media and determines how and when to rob them. Her process alludes to a real-life grifting scheme. Between 2008 and 2009, a group of young, well-off people around Los Angeles—dubbed “the Bling Ring”—tracked famous people such as Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and robbed their homes. The group’s leader, Rachel Lee, “would spot something she liked” and “log onto social networking sites and monitor the celebs’ schedules” (Parten, Constant. “Hollywood’s ‘Bling Ring’ Leaves Celebs Shaken.” CNBC, 2011). In American society and Pretty Things, social media enables criminals to carry out surveillance.
In general, grifters like Nina and influencers like Vanessa captivate society. Similarly, Elizabeth Holmes tricked people into thinking that her company Theranos could conduct blood tests without needles; Anna Sorokin fooled people into thinking that she was a wealthy heiress; and Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway gained notoriety for, among other things, paying someone to write her Instagram captions, leading her to a six-figure book deal and dubious workshop-hosting opportunities. These stories have led to countless cultural products: podcasts, long-form magazine articles, books, TV shows, and movies.
Unlike in most of these cultural products, Brown adds a moral component to the story of the grifting. Nina scams people to pay for her mom’s healthcare, and she chooses targets whom she deems morally repugnant such as “a coke-addled action-film producer with a history of sexual harassment” (260). Once Nina realizes that Vanessa is a human, she drops her plan to scheme against her. Nina’s grifts are presented as less selfish and greedy as those represented in contemporary media; likewise, while Vanessa’s influencer lifestyle manipulates her truth and story, she does not court explicit controversy. Offline, Vanessa kills Lachlan/Michael, but arguably, she acts in self-defense which implies that he deserves his fate.
