Growing pains
Claire Messud explores the dynamics of a childhood friendship that founders on the rocks of teenage expectations, writes Laura Lippman
The first person to break a girl’s heart is almost always another girl. Hormones in our meat and water supply may hasten puberty, but they can’t disrupt this sequence. If you’re female – whether you’re a Betty or a Veronica, a Mary or a Rhoda, even a Betsy or a Tracy – a girl will betray you. She may not do it intentionally, but that will only make it harder.
This sturdy story has been told many times, across all genres. Yet there still seems to be a queasy defensiveness about whether it’s profound enough for literary fiction. Earlier this year, a Vogue article asserted that stories about women’s friendships are now fashionable because of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series. That’s on a par with predicting the little black dress will be a chic wardrobe staple this autumn. There may be a bumper crop of “girl friendship” novels – not to be confused with the recent spate of “Girl” books, although the two can and do overlap – but the former have always been with us. One of the best, Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, was published in 1994.
Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl has much in common with Moore’s novel: two girls, one beautiful and one merely pretty, are coming of age in a fairy tale-like setting. The key difference is that the narrator here is still very young, not even out of high school. The book begins: “You’d think it wouldn’t bother me now. The Burneses moved away long ago. Two years have passed.” Easy to smile at the idea that two years is long ago, but if you’re 17, it’s a big chunk of your life.
Julia and Cassie have been best friends since nursery school. Julia considers their friendship preordained, if only because both have pale blue eyes. In fact, the story of their first meeting has been told so often that Julia no longer knows if her memory of it is real or invented. They live in a small Massachusetts town on the edge of a dark, tempting forest complete with a fathoms-deep quarry and an abandoned mental asylum.
During the summer between sixth and seventh grade, the girls find themselves at a loose end after Cassie’s reckless actions cost them their jobs at the local animal shelter. They go to the quarry, although Cassie has a bandaged arm that prevents her from swimming. They trespass at the asylum, using it as a backdrop for their fantasies. Their friendship is already unravelling, although Julia doesn’t suspect it.
Why do Julia and Cassie grow apart? There are class differences, the tyranny of expectations. Julia is the daughter of a dentist and a freelance writer; Cassie has only her mother, Bev, a hospice nurse widowed when Cassie was a baby. These distinctions don’t matter so much when the girls are in elementary school, but once they enter seventh grade: “Cassie and I were pushed apart by bureaucracy ... together only for PE and orchestra, where she played the flute and I played the cello and we sat on opposite sides of the room anyhow.”
Enter the men. A man and a boy, to be accurate. Anders Shute, the doctor who once tended to Cassie’s hand when she was bitten by a dog, moves in with Bev, inevitably disrupting the household. At about the same time, Peter Oundle, the boy Julia has long fancied, falls for Cassie.
Julia is a pretty good sport about
Messud, who crafts superb sentences, sometimes has trouble ceding the novel’s voice to Julia
the romance between her friend and her long-time crush. She’s more upset that Cassie now prefers the company of another girl, Delia Vosul, whom Julia nicknames the Evil Morsel. By Halloween, Julia is still considering trick-or-treating, while Cassie is at a boy-girl party at the Evil Morsel’s house. (That’s the night she starts dating Peter, although she will jettison him by Christmas.)
Ultimately, the break between Cassie and Julia isn’t about Peter or the Evil Morsel but about an intimacy that can’t be vanquished. Julia can’t unknow Cassie and that’s what Cassie finds unbearable, even if it may save her life. Cassie, all but destroyed by the unravelling of an essential myth, needs to reinvent herself. She can’t do that with Julia around.
This is a human-scale story. Don’t look for literal acts of arson in The Burning Girl, a title that is – sorry – a misfire in the current market, encouraging readers to expect another domestic suspense novel. Here the post-mortem concerns the broken friendship.
And Messud, via Julia, teases out other provocative ideas. The Burning Girl is a story about stories – their power, necessity and inevitable artifice. What does it matter if the tale of how Julia and Cassie met is Julia’s own recollection or her mother’s memory grafted onto hers? Both, Messud suggests, are destined to be equally false. Julia also is aware of how dangerous it is simply to walk around in a girl’s body. “Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid… You came to know, in a way you hadn’t as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified.”
In a bravura section later in the book, Messud describes a particularly awful rite of passage for teenage girls – accepting a ride from a not-quite-stranger, only to be terrified by what didn’t happen.
“And then, afterward, there is the fleeting apprehension, the anxiety, that all the emotion and dread you experienced was a kind of pornography, a sort of made-up fear ... an almost erotic titillation bred in you by your deep understanding of how stories go, how they should go, and when a teenage girl walks alone in the night there is a story, and it involves her punishment, and if that punishment is not absolute – rape and even death itself – then it must, at the very least, be the threat of those possibilities… And that all the stories you’ve grown up with have made you feel, in that moment by the highway, not only like the victim but like the heroine in a story someone else will tell about you: this is a rare occasion when you are the star of the show.”
Does that sound like any 17-yearold girl you know? As someone who was that girl, I recognise the feeling, but not the preternatural ability to articulate it. Messud, always an interesting novelist, a writer who crafts superb sentences, sometimes has trouble ceding the novel’s voice to Julia. Yes, Julia is a star debater and an “A” student, but I wasn’t persuaded that she could form and express these ideas so elegantly, even within the stylised artifice of a novel that’s calling out stylised artifice.
The Burning Girl is a lifetime movie of a novel, one that argues that the inchoate pain caused by a friendship’s end is the story. As someone who doesn’t use “lifetime movie” as a pejorative term, I consider this high praise. But don’t overlook one salient tendency in this age-old tale: the beautiful girl may get the guy, but the smart girl gets the last word. This may make her the most unreliable narrator of all. ■ © NYT 2017