Friends no more
Adolescent female friendship is at the heart of Claire Messud’s sixth book, “The Burning Girl.” For readers of Messud, this narrative might appear to be a departure from her previous novels (most recently “The Woman Upstairs” and “The Emperor’s Children”), where the author took on complicated characters while commenting on the social norms and constructs of our society. Her new novel falls into the coming-of-age genre, an unadorned narrative that charts the broken friendship of two teenage girls, but as her readers have come to expect, Messud is committed to the deep emotional excavation of her characters, revealing and exploring the complex inner impulses that fuel their stories.
“The Burning Girl” is told by Julia Robinson, a teenager who is about to enter her senior year of high school in the small town of Royston, Mass. She has much to look forward to — college, dreams of becoming an actor, maybe a boyfriend. Despite all of this, Julia is heartbroken over the loss of a friendship with her best friend, Cassie Burnes, four years earlier. “Cassie and I met at nursery school,” Messud writes, “and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know her, when I didn’t pick her sleek white head out of a crowd and know exactly where she was in a room, and think of her, some ways, as mine.”
Not surprisingly, Cassie and Julia come from very different families. Julia’s parents are still married: her mother, a freelance journalist (“a vagueness that seems to mean she can be a journalist when it suits her”), her father a dentist. Cassie lives with her mother, Bev, a devout Christian who works as a hospice nurse. Her father died when she was still an infant, and as children often do, Cassie fabricates stories about her absent father, transforming him into a mythical figure in her imagination.
When the reader meets the 12-year-old girls, they are working together at an animal shelter. From the onset, it’s clear that Cassie is more interested in bending the rules than following them when she brings an illicit treat for a mixed pit bull and is attacked. During the rest of the summer, the teens stumbled upon an abandoned asylum and make the derelict institution their secret spot. “I imagined that the building carried the sadness of the women who’d been trapped there,” writes Messud, “the anorexic teenagers and the young mothers who heard voices and the old women shattered past repair by their tragedies.”
As seventh grade commences, the two friends begin to drift from one another, with a number of undercurrents pulling them further apart. Julia becomes more involved in academics and extracurricular activities; Cassie befriends a troublesome teen, begins to drink and smoke pot, and rebels against her mother’s new boyfriend. In addition, Cassie ventures into her own story, looking for her father. When she locates a potential candidate on the Internet, she runs away and attempts to meet him. This section of the novel temporarily falters as most of Cassie’s adventures are filtered through her former boyfriend, Peter. It seems the author’s intention is to create further emotional distance between the two friends with this secondhand storytelling, but the technique dilutes the impact and intensity of the narrative.
Messud’s literary powers are fully engaged when she delves into the emotional landscape of her narrator and all that she has experienced during her short life. At turns, the author’s prose and insights are breathtaking. She doesn’t try to dazzle the reader with pyrotechnic language, but instead distills the truths about the baffling passage of adolescence. Messud writes: “You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you’re suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can’t ever hope to know anything, not even yourself.”
At first glance, “The Burning Girl” is a straightforward story — a breakup between two friends on the cusp of adulthood. But with this novel, Messud brings her own particular brand of astuteness and emotional intelligence through her careful and thoughtful prose. She requires the reader to become an active participant in the narrative, asking a multitude of questions: What are the stories that I tell myself ? What do I see and don’t see? What really happened? What happens when the truth and the story collide? Similar to “The Emperor’s Children,” Messud demands the reader attempt to define the shifting demarcations between what is real and what is imagined.
Near the novel’s end, the author writes: “But we don’t really know anything at all, except how the story should go, and we make believe it’s our story, hoping everything will turn out okay. The difference is that onstage, or in a film, we acknowledge the artifice, we accept that we’ve made a world that excludes what we ignore. Like gods, we invent a world that makes sense.” “The Burning Girl” is certainly a world of Messud’s skillful invention, but also one of truth.