Loved Barbie? Try this mad novel about a millionaire’s drug-addicted dolls
On her death in 2011, at the age of 104, the reclusive heiress Huguette Clark left behind an estate worth more than $300 million – and a vast collection of dolls, one of which ended up in the hands of the poet Karen McCarthy Woolf. The latter gives it, and dozens of its big-eyed companions, a fictionalised voice in her third book, a verse novel as eccentric as Clark herself.
If you want a straight account of Clark’s life, there are biographies; Atonement’s Joe Wright is adapting one for TV. In Top Doll, Clark is only glimpsed, a silent, pitiful enigma shuffling from room to room, her elderly face disfigured by “carcinoma-nasty” (as the dolls call it). Her toys, by contrast, won’t shut up, nattering in a cacophonous mix of dialects and verse styles as they prepare for Clark’s departure for “the hospital”.
Miss Ting speaks in Jamaican patois; Lady Mamiko glides between prose and haiku; the Barbies all boast in abecadarians, a silly, irritating poetic form exactly suited to them. They’re all stock types, apart from the anxious, bossy, distractible Top Doll, simply known as “Dolly”, who pipes up in sonnets with runs of skewed half-rhyme (“chandelier” and “derrière”, “Rockefeller” and “America”), in a Franglais voice halfway between Miss Piggy and the TV meerkat: “This is maximums accurate blurbs!”
Well, you don’t expect verisimilitude from a bunch of mass-produced air-headed dolls. Their lives, meanwhile, include rather more sex and drugs than you might imagine, and internecine intrigue, with a tangled subplot involving double-crossing and a heist of cherry-blossom powder (used for make-up, but also snorted as dollkind’s version of cocaine). But aside from Dolly, “myopic in her loyalties” and poignantly obsessed with protecting her “maman”, their love-triangles and machinations for the powder can feel insubstantial.
Despite McCarthy Woolf’s impressive way with verse forms, the most compelling parts are prose parts by a 19th-century doll, the General, which give us something resembling a plot, via his recollections of his owners’ lives, including the enslaved plantation girl for whom he was originally made, who survives sexual abuse, runs away, and eventually becomes Lt Col Custer’s cook.
Top Doll is a strange picaresque, with its main players all trapped in one New York apartment. What does it all add up to? I’m not sure, but I’ve not read anything quite like it. And to ask for more than that would be “maximum ungratefuls” – as Dolly would say.
Top Doll is published by Dialogue at £20. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
