The Girls
Emma Cline
[Random House]
It’s funny how True Crime, not long ago the preserve of weird uncles and those thin, shiny magazines sold at supermarket checkouts, is now in fashion. Thanks to podcasts and TV shows and Oscar-nominated films, we no longer conceal our love of violence and gore. Not that you’ll find that in The Girls, not explicitly. Emma Cline’s debut novel takes as its raw matter the Manson Family and the Tate-LaBianca murders, but the result is impressionistic. The mood is woozy and intermittently feral. Evie is a teenager bound for boarding school and shuttled between separating parents, skittish and bored when she first encounters the girls. They spirit her away to Russell, Cline’s Manson substitute, whose air of vague folk magic inspires blowjobs and revelation. Cline sidesteps Manson’s race war rhetoric and the deranged “helter skelter” scenario he invoked to terrify his followers. Here, it’s jealousy and petty revenge, along with a dusting of amphetamine logic, which lead to murder.
But perhaps Manson’s grubby presence would have marred the tone. This is a novel about girls – about hormonal subjectivity, clothes and men and experiences shared, and adulthood arriving in irregular dispatches (first kiss, first joint smoked, first awkward inebriated threesome). Cline records the fatalism of a teenager, and her language catapults us into teenage thoughts, into the pressure-cooker discomfort of a developing mind and body. It’s this powerful rendering of female adolescence that makes the book – at times – heartbreaking.
Words: Róisín Kiberd
