In Rebecca Godfrey’s The Torn
Skirt, the narrator is Sara Shaw, a sixteen-year-old girl who lives with
her stoner father.  Her mother left long
ago.  Then one day her father discovers
Sara masturbating in the garden, and he leaves town.  Sara tells her story in disjointed fragments, and sometimes it is
hard to know exactly what’s going on, but it is clear that she is heading for
trouble.  She hangs around with her
stoner friends and they listen to AC/DC and Motorhead (it’s the 1970s), yet she
is detached from her world and is very isolated.  She looks at people around her and she is at a loss trying to
understand them.  She carries a knife
with her at all times because she feels she needs to protect herself, and she
has reason to be worried because she knows that some of her friends assaulted
another girl with a garden hose, sexually. 
Sara drifts from place to place, person to person, getting involved, getting
high, getting into trouble, just trying to survive.  This novel is impressive in its ability to convey Sara’s
alienation from her society and her aimless desperation, and the writing does
sound like the voice of a belligerent smart teenager.  However, it’s a challenging book to read, and it might be more
accessible if listened to as an audiobook. 
The angular prose is reminiscent of existentialist novels of Sartre or
Camus in which the antihero struggles against a pointless and stupid world to
find some point to live, although in the end, Sara’s main goal is simply to get
away.  The Torn Skirt is
admirable precisely because of its bristling attitude to the world, and it’s
worth the effort.

© 2003 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

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

Categories: Fiction