Two Novels on the Dangerous Adolescence of Girls

by Hays Johnson

Dwight Garner opens his review of Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl with, “The fat gods of fortune have smiled this century on novels with ‘girl’ in their titles.” This claim, while much too tasteless and vacuous, does approach some truth: teenagers, particularly girls, have featured prominently in current contemporary literature. Of the six novels we have read in this course, all of which have been released since August 2017, two-thirds center on the lives of young women: of how they grow, experience hardship, and eventually, move on. Two prime examples are Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling and Messud’s aforementioned work, The Burning Girl. Despite wildly different circumstances and backgrounds amongst the novels, the authors, and their characters, both stories share a surprising amount of themes and elements. Furthermore, both succeed in their ability to craft a convincing and compelling portrait of American girlhood.

My Absolute Darling follows Turtle Alveston, a fourteen year old girl growing up in Mendocino, California. Turtle has lived alone with her father, Martin, since her mother died, and their relationship has slowly become more and more abusive and treacherous. This situation makes her school life unbearably difficult and friendships next to impossible. Instead, Turtle slides deeper into Martin’s world, a world of survivalist training, raw eggs, and lots of guns. Her constant abuse and psychic captivity is only abated during her brief escape into the woods, where she finally experiences control and autonomy, and Martin’s disappearance halfway through the novel. Both events allow Turtle to grow and transform herself: she becomes self-sufficient, caring for herself and finding solace in her friendship with two boys and their families. In her father’s absence, she cleans and fixes up her always-dirty house, a metaphor for Turtle’s newfound agency and freedom to positively reshape her life. Upon Martin’s return, she proves to be too liberated to return to their old rhythms, leading to the climactic ending scene.

Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl is also about a young girl experiencing adolescence and finding her place in the world; however, that is where the similarities end. Messud’s protagonist is Julia Robinson, a high school senior recounting her life and friendship with her former best friend, Cassie Burns. Both girls have spent their whole lives together in the small town of Royston, Massachusetts, swimming in the quarry, hiking in the woods, volunteering at the local veterinary clinic, and watching Youtube videos. However, this perfect life collapses when the girls go to middle school, and then high school beyond. Latent differences expand into chasms, and new friends, activities, and social and family situations drive this wedge deeper and deeper until they hardly talk at all.

More and more events occur in the novel; however, this is not the beauty of Messud’s writing. Julia’s voice manages to capture an essence of adolescence that few narrators can. As a teenager myself, I was constantly amazed by the accuracy of Messud’s story: of the descriptions of memory, of the passage of time, of social and home life, of the way tiny details or moments are to be obsessed over and become all that you remember, however arbitrary they seem.

What Messud does even better than capture my experience as a teenager, however, is how she offers me access and the ability to relate to a character and situation that I am not familiar with. There are many differences between Julia’s life and mine, like growing up in a city versus a small town, but the most notable is that she is growing up as a girl, an experience to which I will never be able to fully relate. Julia’s narration is deceptive: the seemingly simple language and straightforward tone make the heavy content that much more powerful when it finally hits you. Sentences like “Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid,” 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 these possibilities, the terror of them,” hit me like a train, and proved that Messud casual and reminiscent voice in no way dictated the severity of her work.

 These raw, forceful descriptions of the reality of growing up as a girl are also present in My Absolute Darling. In Turtle’s case, her situation is much more unusual and difficult, and because of it these questions and issues about bodily safety and security come up much more often. Despite these external pressures, Turtle struggles with many of the same changes that any teenager would, albeit in a different context: an awareness of her changing body, her interactions with men (romantically charged or otherwise), and her independence and sense of self. In fact, these regular concerns in the face of Turtle’s extreme childhood and Julia’s hyper-awareness of body and safety in the context of a fairly “normal” childhood make both stories that much more compelling and convincing, and have opened my eyes as a man to these issues in a unique way.

 While adolescent girlhood has been a common topic in contemporary literature, that does not mean it has escaped criticism. Both Tallent and Messud have received harsh reviews for their novels, although over different concerns. The most outspoken critics are of My Absolute Darling. Both Roxane Gay on Goodreads and S. E. Smith on Bitch Media (titled “My Absolute Misogyny”) wrote scathing reviews of the novel, primarily over concerns of misogyny and appropriating the experiences of women and abuse survivors. Gay and Smith s cite graphic writing of abuse, an emphasis on guns, and detailed descriptions all as, at best, distracting from the narrative and, at worst, exploiting the experiences of survivors of abuse to make a quick buck or a name for himself. While these elements technically do exist in the novel, I find it surprising that anyone who had actually read the whole work could believe this. The attention to detail, for example repeated scenes of Turtle cleaning her gun or her exploration and awareness of her growing body and sexuality in her twisted scenario, all serve to give depth to a novel with nearly zero exposition. Similarly, by forcing the reader to live in the vivid, painful descriptions of Turtle’s abuse, I was able to enter her mind and sympathize with her as effectively as if we had access in the novel to her thoughts and interiority. With all this is mind, it is near impossible to truly label Tallent as a misogynist, or lacking control in his writing; on the contrary, he makes it crystal clear where he stands on Turtle’s experience.

 I would have thought that a women writing such a story of a girl growing up, especially such a successful one, would escape attacks on her voice. But no. Dwight Garner’s review of The Burning Girl, while nowhere near as virulent as those of My Absolute Darling, makes the claim that Messud, rather than lacking authority or “the right” to write what she does, is not forceful enough for what he expected in such a novel. Garner lists her previous novels, The Emperor’s Children and The Woman Upstairs, as evidence of the potential of Messud’s writing, but states that The Burning Girl does not live up to these examples. He states that Julia’s voice, so convincingly a preteen girl, lacks any of the power he associates with Messud. Additionally, he feels that The Burning Girl lacks sentences found in her other novels like The Last Life that, “you could prick your fingers on.” Again, it is surprising to hear this critique coming out of someone who has read the whole book. Just about any sentence from pages 111 to 151 (or really the whole novel) could go toe-to-toe with any of the lines he has picked out from Messud’s earlier work. Additionally, Messud’s precision in writing Julia’s voice does not “[blot] out her own sun” as Garner wrote. In fact, Messud so masterfully inhabits the “constraint” (or rather, the gift) of a teenage girl’s voice that each line becomes that much more sharp, that much more purposeful. She crafted a novel with such insight and prose that I am still actively blown away, a week since I finished it.

 In the aftermath of its explosive climax, My Absolute Darling ends with forty-or-so pages of banality, of mundanity, of “after.” Nothing much happens. It is simply Turtle trying to cope with what has happened to her, and not succeeding, or at least not fully. It does not really end with closure about what happens to Turtle and her life; it does not end on the note that is expected of a story. Similarly, The Burning Girl begins after the end of Cassie’s chapter in Julia’s life, and hits many of the same notes. Julia describes her life with nothing to do and no one to turn to after the events of the novel, returning home, “banging the screen door so loudly that my mother startles each time, and bustles through to the kitchen and looks at me, her eyes filled with emotions that I glimpse one after the other--love, fear, frustration, disappointment, but love, mostly. She usually says only one word--‘Thirsty?’--with a question mark, and that word is the bridge from there to her, and I either say ‘Yep’ or ‘Nope’ and she either pours me water from the jug in the fridge or she doesn’t. We take it from there, we move on.” These are not the parts of a novel that make me want to keep reading for hours on end, nor are they the parts I envision to be part of a “successful” novel. They are however, the parts I remember, the parts that hit me the hardest, the parts that feel the most real, because that is how life often feels in the middle of it, going on without markers or clear-cut plot arcs. When, in the middle of a story about a life I will not lead or a person I will not be, there are moments like these that effortlessly put into words a feeling that is a common and essential part of life yet impossible to fully articulate, and those are the moments that hit the hardest. Much like the ending to last year’s similarly heart wrenching Manchester-by-the-Sea, an ending that was not happy, that did not provide closure, that made me think, “What? There must be more,” these novels do not exactly satisfy me the way a happy, full conclusion might. Instead, these novels leave me shocked after I have reached the ending, and make me feel like I need to spend time acclimating to real life after such a rollercoaster. Both My Absolute Darling and The Burning Girl are, in the case of the former, a noteworthy start to a literary career and, in the case of the latter, just the most recent masterpiece in a long line. I strongly recommend both to any willing to dive into such demanding yet rewarding, thoughtful yet explosive novels.