The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Jewelry Talks by Richard Klein
T.J. Gerlach

Richard Klein. Jewelry Talks. Pantheon, 2001. 227 pp. $25.00.

The narrator of Richard Klein’s Jewelry Talks takes both his title and his project from Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets. But whereas that earlier book uses jewelry as a metaphor for sex, Klein’s narrator wants “sex to be a metaphor for jewelry.” Ostensibly the “anti-autobiography,” as he puts it, of Abby Zinzo, detailing to his niece his experiences with both jewelry and transgendering, it is in parts memoir, historical tract, sociological study and lyrical meditation. The “novelistic” element of the book and the more “essayic” concerns never feel quite organic; at times it feels as if one is propping the other up. But then that may be the point. It isn’t that connections between the two aren’t there. It is that they are so overt, so overly insistent. Gaudy, you might say. Jewelry Talks is an excessive book, and one that is in many ways about excess as can be seen in the four women each chapter is alternately organized around-Coco Chanel, the Duchess of Windsor, Elizabeth Taylor, and Katherine Hepburn. The result is a book packed with fascinating tidbits and some quite beautiful philosophical bursts on jewelry and gender and the way the two entwine. [T. J. Gerlach]