All the Beautiful Girls by Elizabeth J Church (4th Estate) $35
Las Vegas, 1969, is a festival of the fake, a celebration of the cosmetic. It stands, like Ozymandias, alone in the desert, a relic of the past.
In its heyday, Las Vegas epitomised the American Dream. Anyone with talent, determination and hard work could make it here. It attracted the rich and famous – as well as the common, the lonely and the hard-up – to relax and spend.
Elizabeth J Church’s second novel seizes on the allure of Vegas as her setting. It beguiles Lily Decker, a bright, aspiring dancer from Kansas, and catapults her to celebrity. But Lily is damaged goods: she carries a huge weight of guilt and tragedy in her short life. The sole survivor of an awful car crash that killed her parents and sister, she has been brought up by a rigidly sanctimonious aunt and a secretive paedophile uncle.
Lily’s only hope is escape. In this she is aided by a white knight – ‘‘the Aviator’’, the test pilot driver of the other car that slaughtered her family. He helps and encourages her to move to Vegas to pursue a career as a dancer.
A job as a dancer in Vegas comes at a price. Personal integrity is at stake in sin city. Lily swallows her pride, changes her name to Ruby Wilde, and goes for it. She is quickly rewarded with money, fame and admiring men – even Tom Jones and Sammy Davis Jr line up for a go!
Church’s rags-to-riches story has all the elements of a Mills & Boon romance. But it also has more. Beautifully written in places, it captures the tacky sleaziness of Vegas perfectly. The casino capital is a place where ‘‘women’s hips oozed from the backs of their chairs and flowed like slow, lugubrious lava over the edges of their stools’’. It embodies ‘‘hope mixed with despair, longing brushing away reality’s faint protestations’’.
Lily/Ruby is a finely drawn character. A blend of naivety, childish trust and hard-edged commercial astuteness, she fits perfectly into this swirl of infantile dreams and mobster corruption. Swept along by her own ambitions, guilt and sexual exploration, she revels in the excess until her past begins to haunt her again. That guilt just won’t go away.
Church awkwardly attempts to set her Vegas into its historical context. The deaths of MLK and Bobby Kennedy, the Vietnam war protests and the hippy subculture exist in a different world. It is only when Ruby and her lover spend time away in San Francisco that
A blend of naivety, childish trust and hard-edged commercial astuteness, Lily/Ruby fits perfectly into this swirl of infantile dreams and mobster corruption.
she realises the artificiality of her world. But this realisation is too sudden and forced to be meaningful.
With no previous sign of any social or political consciousness, Ruby’s sadness at the death of MLK lacks credibility. It is one of a series of belated and implausible moves by Church to inject significance into this tale. Likewise, the impossibly schmaltzy end is too hard to stomach.
These flaws are a pity, as the novel tries hard to explore the idolisation and exploitation of women’s bodies. It goes some way to achieving this.
– Steve Walker