The Girls

Hello readers and welcome to the second installment of the (revamped) 2019 Reading List! Last time I took on another of my editor Libby’s recommendations: Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. This was another book written by a contemporary female author that I must admit, has completely changed my opinion about today’s publishing landscape. If something this good can still be cranked out by a major house, there is hope for us all.

As you know, this time around I’m taking a more deep dive into each work, which apparently is making me less effective at turnaround as I’m barely clearing a book per week. I am fine with that, however, when the reading is this good. For years I thought Hemingway was the epitome of a stunning, clipped, American sentence. Not so much anymore. Cline’s prose is so well put together I felt lost in her world of alternate 1969 for days on end. Alternate in the sense that this is a reimagining of the Manson family, a peculiar curiosity from that time, one of many my wife has gotten me into over the years. The main character is the only member of the cult not to go to jail, to live her life on the periphery of things, to see it from the author’s perspective, and it is a powerful ride. I had a few quibbles with parts of the prose but let me state flat out that the story itself more than compensates for any issues I had. The framing used, seeing the main character as an old woman, is incredible. You can tell from early on something very bad is going to happen in these people's’ lives, and that tension is threaded intricately throughout.

That being said, I did have a couple of items, both of which could have been caught by her editor. First, there is a luminous couple pages of paragraphs where Evie first encounters “the girls” (meaning those outside her world of high school privilege) which are set right at the beginning of the text. We revisit the scene pretty early in the book, which left me wondering why the decision was made to excise that little bit of text and put it in the front. That’s fairly petty, but my next critique is a bit more substantial. While Cline is presenting a master class in how to use language and metaphor, she does overuse the simile form a bit too much. The word “like” especially becomes overused at times, but I must stress the writing is overall so good I didn’t notice very much.

This was an amazing, dark book and shows reams of potential for this author. Her website lists a bunch of other stuff she’s published, and looks similar to mine (I shudder when looking at my “events” which took place four years ago…). I eagerly anticipate what else she publishes and would highly recommend this book for anyone who has (like me) been discouraged with the state of contemporary fiction. Up next, I’m on to another female author, Edan Lepucki and her 2014 debut California. Thanks as always for reading!

(I should add I am now able to devote my full break at my day job to reading non-fiction, so hope to compile some of those titles here for those who may have interest. First down the hatch was one I have wanted to read for at least a decade: Alan Weisman’s landmark 2007 thought experiment The World Without Us. A major help for my current sci fi/dystopian manuscript.)​