Mean girls turn deadly
Ocean State
Stewart O'nan Atlantic
Ocean State opens with this shocking line: “When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl.”
The full horror of the crime is soon revealed: The victim was a popular high school student. The two girls were fighting over a boy.
O'nan has purposefully drained the tension from this tragedy. What's left for us in Ocean State are doleful reflections on various characters' motives and reactions. It's a gamble.
The novel's first narrator, Marie, introduces us to her poor family in Rhode Island. Her pretty sister, the teenage murderer, goes by the ironic name “Angel.” Their mother is a nurse's aide with one talent: “finding new boyfriends.” That ensures a precarious life for the family. As usual, O'nan writes about financially stressed people with a clear and empathetic sense of the constant pressures they endure. Their plight is well represented by Marie and Angel's 42-yearold mother. When she discovers that the latest man she's dating lives in “an active adult community” — that is, a retirement home — she feels humiliated but excited by the chance for stability. Perhaps if she hadn't been so focused on manufacturing a romance with her geriatric beau, she might have noticed what her daughter Angel was up to. Maybe not. As Marie notes, “My sister seemed to move through an underworld of secrets, the hidden currents of desire.”
Indeed, that underworld of clandestine teenage desire is the ostensible subject of Ocean State. O'nan spends much of the novel shuttling between Angel and her nemesis, Birdy Alves. They're both sleeping with Myles, a good-looking senior from a wealthy family. He's savvy enough to try to keep his relationship with Birdy on the down-low, but when photos of them sneaking around slip out on social media, their classmates turn against her. And then Angel lashes out.
High school girls fighting over and even killing for the affections of a boy make this an inherently gripping plot. But O'nan's approach is — pardon the word — deadly. Two-thirds of the novel are spent chronicling teenage angst and school-hall drama without the verve necessary to make this story pump with authentic adolescent energy. O'nan's careful, sepia-toned observations offer no satirical wit on the machinations of horny teenagers nor any chilling insight on the horrors that sexual desire can activate.
We're deeply familiar with the tropes of the genre. We don't particularly need a novel that feels so unwilling to tell us something we haven't already heard. Even the act of murder itself is politely obscured in these pages, and the trial that takes place late in the story does so largely offstage.
More than a decade ago, O'nan published Songs for the Missing, a devastating story about parents crushed by the endless search for their 18-year-old daughter. No one who read that relentlessly static tragedy will ever forget it. But this new novel, about the loss of another teenage girl, leaves little impact at all.