So I picked up Emma Cline’s earlier novel, The Girls. And what do you think?
It’s a Bildungsroman.
Every writer nowadays tries to squeeze out a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel). And we all know how fed up I am with the genre, having read more than a fair share of them for my doctoral dissertation. I didn’t think anybody could surprise me with their Bildungsroman. But Emma Cline did.
Cline writes about the discovery of womanhood by a 14-year-old girl, and it’s so spot-on that it’s kind of scary. She shows what it’s like to grow up with a mother who can only teach you to be every man’s second or third choice. And the crooked path by which female sexuality is formed. The confused and hungry appraisal of different ways of being a woman.
Evie, the main character of The Girls, grows up observing her parents’ broken marriage, the mother pathetically trying to appease yet another gross, married boyfriend. The father running after secretaries decades younger than himself. There’s money, comfort, yet everything is so tawdry and humiliating, especially if you are a woman.
A girl like Evie is the perfect victim for a cult. Today, she’d be preyed on by OnlyFans or hormone peddlers. But the novel is set in 1969, so Evie ends up in the Manson cult. This is another topic I normally don’t like because I disagree that Manson should have been convicted for “the girls'” crimes.
Cline, however, is way too young to buy into the mythology of the hippie era. She wants to show what makes an adolescent want to debase and destroy herself. The Manson cult is only one of the many ways that this self-demolition can occur.
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