Serious Girls is a
coming-of-age novel about two sixteen-year-old girls that reminds me of some
old French films.  Maya and Roe go to a secluded private boarding school for
girls not far from New York City, and start exploring their freedom.  The story
is narrated by Maya, who starts dating an older man and then becomes more
heavily involved in his life.  Her best and only real friend Roe starts dating
a boy from the local town, and is drawn into an abusive relationship.  When the
summer arrives and they both leave the school, their romances become more
serious and troubled. 

This is a disconcerting novel, for
a number of reasons.  While it seems to be set in the present day, it has a
feel of being from a previous age.  Who sends their daughter off to exclusive
private girls schools these days?  In their reading of nineteenth century
novels, Maya has a crush on Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre while Roe is
more interested in Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights.  Maya chooses
soccer for her mandatory sport, while Roe does ballet.  When the two girls go
into the city on Saturdays, they eat lunch in a Dominican diner on Broadway,
where they serve rice and beans or fried plantains instead of potatoes.  These
girls seem like characters from an earlier era, not necessarily more innocent,
but largely free of the trappings of the modern world.  There are no cell
phones or email accounts here, and people don’t worry about money. 

So the girls are curiously
distanced from the reader.  What’s more, Maya isn’t a sympathetic lead
character.  She narrates her story in short, clipped sentences, which conveys
some sense of unformed emotions or even a numb dissociation.  When Maya is
caught in a violation of school rules, she is brought before the school
Disciplinary Board, but she is merely grounded rather then expelled, because
she is a good student.  Her boyfriend Arthur is very upset, and she feels
flattered by his reaction.  Roe is extremely relieved that Maya isn’t expelled,
but Maya merely says, "I should count myself lucky."  That seems to
be the full extent of her emotional reaction, and even that looks simply like a
quotation of what Roe said.  It’s as if Maya has no feelings of her own except
a faint concern with other people’s attitudes to her.  Even after Arthur has
taken her virginity, and she has enjoyed the experience, her comment shows her
in a passive light.  She has "that woozy feeling you get at the end of the
summer when all the smells, fruit, earth, flowers, are beginning to turn from
sweet to rotten and are overwhelmingly strong."  They have almost no
conversation.  "I lie there listening rapturously to the city passing
by." 

Swann’s writing conveys well the
unformed character of Maya, and shows her experiencing a relationship for the
first time, self-consciously observing her own reactions, going through the
difficulties of growing estrangement, unsure how to proceed, deeper in trouble
than she expected.  Serious Girls is a nicely crafted work, achieving an
almost poetic simplicity.  Yet it is hard to care much about Maya and Roe,
because they lack an immediate presence.  It’s possible that it is a book that
will appeal more to female readers — all the writers giving high praise for
the book quoted on the back cover are women — but it is just as likely that
the barrier to identification with the book’s protagonist is to do with class
as it is to do with gender.  Maya’s background of privilege, despite her
dysfunctional and eccentric family, may make the reader somewhat less
sympathetic to her foolish choices. 

One of the most elusive aspects to
the novel that deserves comment is Maya’s relationship to Jasper, one of her
mother’s old boyfriends, with whom Maya used to live.  They were close and he
wants to keep on visiting her and talking often, but she pushes him away as
soon as she arrives at the boarding school, and she refuses to even speak to
him later on.  The story seems to hint that something unhealthy happened
between Maya and Jasper, but this is never confirmed.  Maybe the fact that she
sought a relationship with an older man, Arthur, when for her first boyfriend,
is some evidence that there was some kind of inappropriate love between her and
Jasper.  If so, her rejection of Arthur suggests that she has come to be able
to reject Jasper by the end of the story, and this is her real growth.  If so,
her growth is still limited, because she still rejects him not by direct
confrontation but rather by avoidance and lying, and this tendency seems to be
a fixed part of her character.

© 2004 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also
editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction