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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The publisher's press release I received accompanying the book describes Freudenberger's work as "exquisite." In some ways, though only bad ones, it is kind of exquisite: Her characters are the type of people who write poetry and use actual leaves and a strainer to make tea. What I ultimately admired about the book was not its precious moments, however, but its oddness and unpredictability, its willingness -- Freudenberger's willingness -- to make the stories messier in a way that also makes them more real. There are many moments of drama that are built up to and then don't happen, even when, at least initially, the characters believe they have. A father reminisces poignantly about his daughter as a 7-year-old, but instead of letting that section end in an achingly beautiful way, a way that would be truer to fiction than to life, the narrator reveals that she thinks her father's memory is inaccurate. In another story, an American girl living in Bombay tries to seduce her Indian tutor by dancing in front of him -- but, though the girl is attractive, "she was not a good dancer." The dialogue, which does an especially nice job capturing the cadence of both teenagers and close family members, features people saying things such as, "I'm sorry I'm all gross from tennis," and, "Scallops are weird. Do they even have heads?" The beauty of such lines is that they're not, thank God, exquisite.
The stories are thematically linked -- in addition to travel, they touch repeatedly on absent mothers, adolescent sexual initiation, and writing itself -- but they're not heavy-handedly so. There is something patient about Freudenberger's writing, a gradual build-up to the important moments so they really feel important. Or, in the writing workshop lingo that is both cringe-inducing and hard not to use, they feel "earned": "He looked at me directly, with a sudden focused intensity. It was a quality of attention I hadn't experienced before, an ability he had to suggest that everything that had gone before had led to this precise moment."
Both the individual characters, especially the stories' protagonists, and the stories themselves, possess an unusual knowingness. In many cases, the characters possess a kind of double awareness -- they know what they know, and they also know enough to try to protect others from their knowledge. When a child sees a deformed man in a slum in India, "I looked quickly at my shoes, to reassure whichever adult I was with that I hadn't seen [him]." Eventually, the double knowingness becomes a triple knowingness -- the final story, told by a teenage girl, concerns a famous writer and blithely mentions, in a discussion of the famous writer's work, the presence of "the one weird detail that makes you know it's real" as well as the commonplace assumption that the author and his or her characters are more or less the same person.
In these moments, it is hard not to think of Freudenberger herself, and, simultaneously, it's hard to locate where exactly she comes down on any given situation or idea. Which is not to say the writing is coy, more that it's admirably lacking in ego -- it's not an assertion of the writer's personality. I don't know, based on her writing, who Nell Freudenberger is, but the more I read her book, the more I saw that she was in control, that she had known all along what would happen. And I was forced to admit: Given the preponderance of characters who are young, female and privileged without necessarily being happy, "Lucky Girls" is exactly the right title for the book. And five stories, especially five longish ones, is exactly the right length. It's no secret that in collections with the more standard eight or 10 stories, three or four usually stink -- so why not preemptively cut the flab?
In Freudenberger's last story, the famous writer is revealed to be less than likable, and yet he is given what I thought (and I'm not particularly fond of fiction about writers) was the book's loveliest passage:
"For a few minutes after he'd finished [writing] a book, when he knew it was good but before anyone else had seen it, he felt no pressure to exist at all; the book existed for him. It was like being invisible in the silent woods, so strange a figure that someone passing on the trail above him would only with great difficulty focus on him and think: That is a man. Instead they would see a shadow or a storm-broken tree and move on ... He knew it wouldn't last, but for these few, charmed moments, looking at the frozen reservoir, Henry felt that things had been put in order; nothing could touch him; he was outside of everything, and at peace."
For me, this is it precisely -- Nell Freudenberger's book not only reminded me why I read, it also reminded me why I write. In my defense, I didn't love "Lucky Girls" (phew!), I didn't feel as though I needed it, but I did like it a lot.
So now that it seems I'm the newest member of the Nell Freudenberger fan club (you know, just me, Bill Buford, Binky Urban, and Daniel Halpern, hangin' out, shootin' the literary shit -- I suppose Richard Ford could be let in, too, as he gives Freudenberger a glowing blurb on the book cover), I'm not sure what's next. On the one hand, my congenital bitterness and envy feel unfocused, at loose ends. On the other hand, there are lots of MFA programs, conferences, literary magazines and anthologies, and every day they get filled by writers younger and cuter than I am. Plus, there's a lot of really bad fiction out there -- not just wish-it-was-bad fiction that's actually really good, but bad-bad fiction. Surely it's only a matter of time before I find someone new to detest.
