I’m here to introduce two novels about girls who become fixated on another girl in childhood and pick up the relationship again as young adults. In the first, set in Vietnam and the USA, the main focus is on the friendship in childhood; in the second, set in New York, the adult obsession is in the foreground. In both books, the main character has a problematic relationship with her mother: in the first, the mother is painfully distant; in the second, mother and daughter are initially enmeshed.
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If I Had Two Lives by Abbigail N Rosewood
Our narrator is seven years old when she is driven to a Vietnamese military camp to live with the mother who is incarcerated for her own protection, her work investigating government corruption too much of a threat to the status quo. While her mother hardly averts her eyes from her computer screen to welcome her, the child receives some ad hoc education from the soldier assigned to the two-person family and friendship from the only other girl in the camp.
Both girls’ childhoods are blighted by deprivation: our narrator’s the lack of her mother’s attention and her friend’s material poverty, inappropriate paternal attention and the absence of a mother at all. But our narrator’s parent is able to put her research on pause momentarily to recognise this is no life for a child. Whether her decision to send her, at twelve, to stay with various relatives and acquaintances in the USA, and to bury her Vietnamese identity as soon as she gets on the plane, is the right one, is difficult to judge. But it’s fair to say that, when we pick up her story again in New York City, she doesn’t seem the most adjusted of young adults.
Still following the script of her childhood, she pulls out the stops to find an apartment in the same building as a stranger who resembles her soldier and falls in love with a married woman who reminds her of her childhood friend. When she signs up to have a baby as a surrogate, it’s the start of a journey that will lead her back to Vietnam.
Abbigail N Rosewood’s lyrical debut is a fresh take on dislocation and insecure attachment, with a nod to the side of Vietnam tourists never see. Thanks to Europa Editions for my review copy. For a novel about an earlier point in Vietnamese-American relationships, see my review of The Outside Lands.
Both girls’ childhoods are blighted by deprivation: our narrator’s the lack of her mother’s attention and her friend’s material poverty, inappropriate paternal attention and the absence of a mother at all. But our narrator’s parent is able to put her research on pause momentarily to recognise this is no life for a child. Whether her decision to send her, at twelve, to stay with various relatives and acquaintances in the USA, and to bury her Vietnamese identity as soon as she gets on the plane, is the right one, is difficult to judge. But it’s fair to say that, when we pick up her story again in New York City, she doesn’t seem the most adjusted of young adults.
Still following the script of her childhood, she pulls out the stops to find an apartment in the same building as a stranger who resembles her soldier and falls in love with a married woman who reminds her of her childhood friend. When she signs up to have a baby as a surrogate, it’s the start of a journey that will lead her back to Vietnam.
Abbigail N Rosewood’s lyrical debut is a fresh take on dislocation and insecure attachment, with a nod to the side of Vietnam tourists never see. Thanks to Europa Editions for my review copy. For a novel about an earlier point in Vietnamese-American relationships, see my review of The Outside Lands.
Poet and Dancer by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Angel is three when she creates her first poem. Her grandparents, with whom she lives along with her mother in New York, are sure this heralds a promising future. But poetry isn’t the child’s greatest love. Although she tolerates school, and uncomfortable visits to her father and maternal grandmother, she adores being at home with her mother.
She’s eight when she switches her affections to Lara, her pretty cousin who loves to dance. The girls don’t meet again until they’re young adults: while Angel is still enthralled by Lara, she seems to have forgotten they ever met. But, narcissistically craving attention, she responds to Angel’s doting and they become friends. When Lara begins an affair with Angel’s father, he buys a flat where the girls can live together. They keep it barely furnished on the pretence that Lara will use it as a dance studio, but her talent has stalled, and Angel’s too.
As Lara becomes progressively more disturbed and disturbing, Angel – supported by her father who, as a doctor, but not Lara’s, writes out prescriptions for various unnamed drugs – continues to subjugate her own needs in her cousin’s defence. It seems inevitable that, when Lara plummets, Angel will too.
First published in 1993, and reissued by Abacus this month (to whom thanks for my review copy), Poet and Dancer is about the importance of boundaries and how unconditional devotion to a flaky personality can contribute to the downfall of both despot and slave. If you haven’t read any of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s numerous novels and short stories before, I’d recommend starting with the 1975 Booker Prize winner, Heat and Dust, before this, which I found somewhat underwhelming.
She’s eight when she switches her affections to Lara, her pretty cousin who loves to dance. The girls don’t meet again until they’re young adults: while Angel is still enthralled by Lara, she seems to have forgotten they ever met. But, narcissistically craving attention, she responds to Angel’s doting and they become friends. When Lara begins an affair with Angel’s father, he buys a flat where the girls can live together. They keep it barely furnished on the pretence that Lara will use it as a dance studio, but her talent has stalled, and Angel’s too.
As Lara becomes progressively more disturbed and disturbing, Angel – supported by her father who, as a doctor, but not Lara’s, writes out prescriptions for various unnamed drugs – continues to subjugate her own needs in her cousin’s defence. It seems inevitable that, when Lara plummets, Angel will too.
First published in 1993, and reissued by Abacus this month (to whom thanks for my review copy), Poet and Dancer is about the importance of boundaries and how unconditional devotion to a flaky personality can contribute to the downfall of both despot and slave. If you haven’t read any of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s numerous novels and short stories before, I’d recommend starting with the 1975 Booker Prize winner, Heat and Dust, before this, which I found somewhat underwhelming.
 | I’m revisiting an intense childhood friendship in my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, right now, in preparation for an event in Nottingham at the end of this month. Better brush up on this post on friendship fact and fiction hosted by my lovely Australian friend, Norah Colvin, almost four years ago. |
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