Recent Reviews
The Girls by Emma Cline
When my daughter, Rebecca, recommended The Girls by Emma Cline, I hesitated. Since I grew up in Northern California and knew of the horrific Manson killings, I felt reluctant to visit a fictionalized account of that gruesome time. She persisted, “Mom you will like it, there is minimal violence. The book focuses on the psychology of the people involved.” She was right and I am pleased I read it.
The Girls is an impressive novel by a woman who knows both the terrain of 1960’s northern California and the emotional vulnerability of young girls. Cline seeks to understand how a group of teenage girls could follow a charismatic, insane man and eventually kill for him. The novel’s power derives from its unique structure: the narration rotates between the protagonist Evie Boyd’s present middle-aged voice and her past teenage voice that describes how she came to join one of the most famous and viscous cults to emerge from that decade. With the benefit of time and perspective, middle-aged Evie offers insight and understanding about the choices she made as a lonely, insecure teen.
Evie’s parents' divorce when she is fifteen. Her father leaves her mother to live with a younger woman. Evie’s mom’s devastation permeates what is left of their little family. Evie is already a bit of an outcast at school and her peer group is cruel. With her parents’ focus on their own lives, their attention toward Evie fades. Evie says, “The hidden world that adolescents inhabit, surfacing from time to time only when forced, training their parents to expect their absence. I was already disappeared.” When Evie meets Suzanne, a 19-year-old cult member who becomes a mother-figure to Evie, Evie begins to feel loved, seen, and known. “Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved.” Little by little, Evie spends more and more time at this remote ranch of runaway teenagers while telling her distracted parents that she is at a friend’s house. “I was starting to fill in all the blank space in myself with the certainties of the ranch.”
The novel follows these lost young people of the 60’s who crave attention from those who understand their profound sense of alienation. Suzanne introduces Evie to Russell, the cult leader, and Evie feels attractive and desired. However, underneath his gentle hippie demeanor, Russell is an abusive, sexual predator. Cline captures the breakdown of the social order in one community during the 60’s when old norms are shattered and replaced by chaos.
What amazes me about Cline‘s book is that she did not grow up during this time. She makes no judgments; she simply describes the emotional snowball effect of Russell and Suzanne’s influence on this group of vulnerable young women. She does not dwell on the specific gruesome climax when the girls follow Russell’s orders to kill. Rather she helps her readers better understand how a group of girls could become brainwashed enough to abandon normative behavior and behave with such depravity. Cline’s pensive prose and impressive insight give us a plausible version of the troubled lives of her characters. Evie joins the group almost by accident and yet, as she tells us later, it destroyed her life. An impressive first novel by Emma Cline.
Homegoing by Yaa Gysai
Yaa Gyasi’s powerful and painful novel begins in Ghana in the late 1700’s where we meet two half-sisters, Effia and Esi. James Collins, the British governor of the western African “Gold Coast,” marries Effia. Effia moves into the large white castle with Collins and he treats her well. However, Collins reigns over the castle’s dungeon where unbeknownst to Effia, her half-sister Esi waits to be sold into American slavery. The novel’s harrowing narrative rotates between the travails of Effia’s descendants in Africa and Esi’s descendants in America. Both Effia and Esi’s children must contend with new versions of subjugation.
Each generation finds themselves captive to some trauma at the hand of white men. Over time, Esi’s progeny experience captivity in the dungeon, the horror of the ship ride to America, the barbarity of rape and slavery, freed slaves sent back to plantations, indentured servitude, Jim Crow laws of the South, and the drug trade and prejudice in the North. Effia’s progeny in Africa experience fierce battles between the Ashanti and Fanti tribes as they fight for the right to align with European countries to profit from the slave trade. There are tribal wars, sexual violence, machete battles, Colonialism, fires, madness, banishment, and isolation. On both continents, old oppressions end and new ones take their place.
Like a richly textured painting, Homegoing is layered with generations of pain and suffering. It is as if the layers of tragedy are seemingly transferred consciously and unconsciously from one generation to the next. It becomes clear that the dominant survival task of each generation is to navigate the oppression they experience while hoping for a better life for their children. Overcoming racism and/or oppressive tribal customs is a daily task of the characters we meet.
The novel’s structure is as effective as it is impressive. Gyasi does not follow each person from birth to death but instead allows each son or daughter to pick up the narrative from his or her perspective as they connect their own decisions to the hard choices made by their parents. Each individual must navigate oppressive institutional racism along the way.
In beautiful language, Gyasi conveys how, even centuries later, Effia’s seventh great-granddaughter living in the present carries the burden of all the suffering that came before. Marjorie says, “She feared that the nightmares would come for her too, that she too would be chosen by the ancestors to hear their family stories.” In spite of all the horror, the characters exhibit a deep spirituality and psychological awareness about their plight. Even with incremental improvements in the lives of each generation, Gyasi says, “No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.”
In the final pages of "Homegoing", Esi’s seventh great-grandson Marcus Clifton, a Ph. D. candidate at Stanford University, wonders, “How could he explain it to (his girlfriend) Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it - not apart from it, but inside of it.” I believe that this desire is what Gyasi sought to achieve in her novel. She has achieved her goal and so much more.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
I enjoyed Celeste Ng’s second novel Little Fires Everywhere. The drama blasts open when Izzy Richardson, the youngest of Elena and Duncan Richardson’s four children, sets their family home on fire. The novel then retraces the events preceding the fire. Ng digs into the inner lives of Elena Richardson and her children to show us that families that look “put together” from the outside can actually be unhealthy and dysfunctional, while families that look atypical can be healthy and functional. Such irony would not please Elena Richardson who marries her college sweetheart, has four children and, in a concession to motherhood, writes fluffy personal interest stories rather than investigative journalism pieces for the local paper. Like her mother and grandmother, Elena was raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a planned and rule-bound community founded by the Shakers at the turn of the century. She remains in Shaker Heights and relishes in the knowledge and security that derive from her lineage.
When she rents her rental property to a peripatetic artist named Mia and Mia's high school daughter, Pearl, the Richardson family is permanently altered. Pearl becomes enthralled with three of Elena’s teenagers while the fourth child, Izzy, spends her time helping Mia with her art projects. Izzy feels understood and appreciated when she is with Mia, and Pearl is enamored of the bustling Richardson home.
When Mia helps a destitute co-worker who drops her infant off at the fire station, it is a catalytic moment in the narrative. Elena Richardson’s best friend, Linda McCullough, has adopted the young infant. A custody battle ensues, with Mia helping the young co-worker get her baby back while Elena and her husband fight for the adoptive parents. “So it was her tenant, her quiet little eager-to-please tenant, who had started all of this. Who had, for reasons still unclear, decided to upend the poor McCulloughs’ lives.” Elena Richardson feels that Mia has betrayed her. She turns to her investigative journalism skills to track down Mia’s past. Like a detective, she visits Mia’s estranged parents and learns about events that led to Pearl’s birth and Pearl's unnamed father. (I like where Celeste Ng was taking her readers, but I needed more signals to convince me that Elena would pursue Mia’s past with such intensity.)
There are a couple of clues that Elena is jealous of Izzy’s relationship with Mia. Izzy’s birth had been difficult and frightening. Elena says, “She had learned with Izzy’s birth how your life could trundle along on its safe little track and then, with no warning, skid spectacularly off course. Every time Mrs. Richardson looked at Izzy, that feeling of things spiraling out of control coiled around her again, like a muscle she didn’t know how to unclench.” Elena’s fear reveals itself as anger when a situation involves Izzy. Does she still resent Izzy for wreaking havoc on Elena’s orderly world when Izzy was a child? The other kids model Elena’s behavior and make Izzy feel like an outcast.
Like a perfect storm, events culminate and coalesce and lead to Elena’s eviction of Mia and Pearl. For Izzy, these events are the fuse that lights the fire.
I admire Ng’s effort to explore the emotions of all her characters. She understands the complicated feelings, inner turmoil, and unique needs of her characters. Little Fires Everywhere is an excellent examination of intricate family dynamics.
