As I forced myself to turn the
pages of Amanda Marquit’s first novel Shut the Door, I speculated
whether it could be read as a comedy, maybe as a satire of modern exposés of
the suburban family, and I hoped that there would be some twist in the plot
that would reveal a wry knowing author, maybe with a hint of The Stepford
Wives.  Unfortunately, I instead resigned myself to the conclusion that
this young writer has created a work similar in tone to the dreadful recent
movie Thirteen.  The most interesting thing about the book is the
photograph of Marquit on the inside back flap of the cover, because it makes
her look like a teenage heroin-addicted hooker, and that’s an unusual marketing
ploy by the publisher. 

The format is simple enough.  There are four family
members: parents Harry and Beatrice and their daughters Vivian, 17, and Lilliana,
16.  Each writes a page or two telling their story from their perspective, and
they take turns.  Harry has gone one a business trip to Cleveland, leaving the
family behind.  He is sexually frustrated because he hasn’t had sex with his
wife for years, and what sex they had before was very unsatisfying.  Harry
starts to go out of control as he abandons his responsibilities.  Beatrice is a
devoted wife whose identity comes from her role as dutiful partner and mother,
but she has a crisis because nobody wants to talk to her.  She becomes
increasingly out of touch with reality as she tries to hold on to her former
identity.  Lilliana was raped at 13 and has since then been sexually
promiscuous, freely having boys and men in her room while her parents try to
ignore her activities.  Yet while she enjoys having the ability to be sexually
intimidating to males, she finds that there is no emotional satisfaction in
those empty relationships, so she takes to cutting herself ever more
dangerously.  Her older sister Vivian is a virgin, but is tired of being
considered unattractive, so she decides to change her image, going on a
dramatic diet, getting new clothes, dying her hair, getting her navel pierced,
and befriending the sluttiest girl she knows to become popular.  And that is
basically it.  The story proceeds inexorably, determinedly, without humor or
character development.  Although it is only 225 pages long, it did not end soon
enough.  It could possibly have made a striking short story, but as a novel it
was interminable. 

The
publisher makes much of the fact that Marquit started the book when she was 14
and completed it at 16.  In the blurb on the back, author Caroline Leavitt is
quoted as saying Marquit "pulls us inside the dangerous fault lines of a
family about to earthquake," (and here is a warning sign: what competent
writer uses "earthquake" as a verb?)  Obviously there’s a market for
writing by teenage girls writing about sex and self-mutilation, which the
publisher is presumably hoping to capture.  The movie Thirteen, released
a year or so ago, gained a great deal of press because it was co-written by a
teenaged girl, and was based on her own experiences.  But that film was
sensationalistic and thin in plot, having very little light to shed on the
pressures on teen girls, and Shut the Door suffers from similar
weaknesses.  It is no secret that young teen girls are cutting themselves and
having sex, perhaps in epidemic proportions.  One only needs to turn on daytime
TV talk shows to see similar stories told over and over again.  Presumably we
might learn more about what is causing these problems by letting the girls
themselves tell their stories, but Marquit’s novel is just trite and
simplistic.  Indeed, I barely found it readable and was immensely relieved to
finish it. 

© 2005 Christian
Perring. All rights reserved.