Emma Cline’s book The Girls is a coming-of-age story set in Northern California in 1969 about a girl who joins a Manson-like cult.Megan Cline
It was summer. She had a way about her. Both conditions – the girl whose plainest mannerisms consolidate how you perceive the world and the balmy season that further adds to that illusion – are popular tropes in coming-of-age narratives. Think: Rohmer's girls waxing existential while lazing at the beach, The Virgin Suicides and its adaptation, or Blue is the Warmest Color's love story. (I'll never forget Manohla Dargis's 2013 review of it that begins: "It was her derrière that first caught my eye.")
For the most part, both conditions – the girl, the season – are physical. They scorch. They lay siege. The sun cheers imprudence or drags the span of a day, underscoring loneliness. The sun encourages gaze. Sweat draws attention to the pubescent thrill or shame of bodies changing, not changing, and how someone not much older can appear like she's far more experienced, simply because her bikini bottoms hug her hips or how her posture exudes indifference when she's playing with the frayed hem of her jean shorts or kicking off her worn, dirty sandals.
As a girl, come summer, it's possible you were either, like Jo Ann Beard describes in the first essay of her 1999 collection, The Boys of My Youth, "embarrassed to be noticed," or longing to be noticed. Or neither. It's possible you were the girl who was near eulogized – desperately from afar, or from close by, through the eyes of your best friend. You were the girl whose mere body language could engine narrative. It's what Marguerite Duras's narrator confesses in The Lover: "My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women." Like Virginia Woolf, who wrote to Ethel Smyth in 1930, saying, "Women alone stir my imagination," the poet May Sarton told the Paris Review in 1983, "I'm only able to write poetry when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me."
Which brings us to Emma Cline's first novel, The Girls. A debut that joins the tradition of white-girl-coming-of-age stories, capturing that fleeting period between childhood and adulthood where adolescence is a scab one picks, not just out of restlessness, but in order to scar, to feel – even if it's to feel numb. It's the privilege required to ruin what's good and pure, and wreck in order to establish some autonomy and experience a deluge of firsts. This novel maps coming of age, not just as a series of big, violent, actions that change the course of a young girl's life, but coming of age as a series of cues and currents, and impressionable exchanges; those sacred coded nothings that pass between girls, that urge us on, and as Cline writes, subtly rearrange the air.
Set in 1969, The Girls is narrated by a middle-aged Evie Boyd, who looks back with itemized clarity – not on late-sixties America – but on her teenage self and the fateful summer she joined a Manson-like cult, soon after her parents' divorce. Evie is an upper-middle-class 14 year old, passing the time in Northern California, lying in wait. For what? She doesn't know. She's feeling new distance from her friend Connie, and daydreaming about boys. "So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act," she says. "Trying to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love."
Disenchanted by her days, she glamourizes what's anodyne like a sleep cure she'd read about in Valley of the Dolls. "It sounded perfect," she says. "My body kept alive by peaceful, reliable machines, my brain resting in watery space, as untroubled as a goldfish in a glass bowl."
But soon, she meets Suzanne, a nervy, young Angelica Huston-type-beauty who focuses Evie's world. Through a series of manipulations, tests, involving promises, and abuse, Suzanne enlists Evie into a cult lead by a Manson-like Russell Hadrick. Evie's susceptibility makes her a model, albeit hesitant at times, devotee. She lies to her mother about where she's spending her nights and steals money from her, too, which she then passes along to Suzanne and Russell at the ranch. Over a short period of time, Evie grows, perhaps not into herself, but at ease amongst the girls she'd romanticized in the park, whose laughter she'd felt, then, was a "rebuke to [her] aloneness." Now she was one of them. Describing one evening of dancing and coke, and the "comic fill" of men watching from the side, she says, "I was so lulled into feeling that the world had winnowed itself around Suzanne and me."
The Girls is by no means historical. The Manson framework is vague. What's centralized is Evie's relationship with Suzanne and even more so – distractingly sometimes – Cline's style. An excess of brilliant metaphors choke the story. I found myself nodding along to, for example, "houseboats knocking peaceably against each other, like ice cubes," but wishing I was wondering about Evie's next move instead of agreeing that, yes, houseboats gently float like ice cubes in my drink. While Cline's writing beautifully dislodges the reader, remarkable exactness can burn up instead of remain incandescent.
Still, Cline excels at capturing just how far "the real" recedes when one girl falls under the influence of another. Those rare connections – no matter how toxic or confining – that bring life "into sharp, mysterious relief, revealing a world beyond the known world, the hidden passage behind the bookcase." Evie likens Suzanne's possessive touch to the singular hush that comes over her in movies theatres or at church. Even the slightest acknowledgments from Suzanne, like a laugh, provide Evie with sustenance – "news of her interior" – like the two are "occupying the same song." Like Evie is held captive.
So finely spun, it's as if Cline's prose is holding up a magnifying glass to the atmospheric pressure that surrounds fast friendship between girls – these girls, that is. Hers is a study of what young women, in groups, can emit and how, despite seducing others, are the ones ultimately the most irretrievably seduced. The luxury of being bored by the rhythms of normal life and summer's lag, translate, in this novel, to the mistakes a sense of vacancy can produce. Belonging, as Cline artfully depicts, is both a come-on and gamble.
Durga Chew-Bose is a Montreal-based writer. She is currently working on her first collection of essays.