Hasta La Gadget!

Sometimes it seems as though every girl had an impossibly beautiful best friend in high school. Maybe that’s just a function of the almost prescribed insecurity young women face as teens. Our tummies are too soft, our knees too knobbly, our hair too flat and our skin congested. Someone else is always more perfect, and that someone else can become an fixation.    

Basically, teenagers are shallow. The narrator of Marlena, a woman named Cat, realizes that, looking back. She’s telling the story of her high school best friend from the vantage point of a grown-up, someone who’s graduated, gotten out and made a new life. She’s aware that her own teenage self cared about the wrong things. Marlena, she recalls, “was alarmingly pretty ― sly, feline face, all cheekbone and blink ― and if I am honest, that was the first reason I wanted to become friends.” She catalogues her own physical flaws, then adds, “Still, I believed that at any second I might become beautiful. I was crazy about girls who already were.”

Marlena’s beauty, it turns out, also serves as misdirection; Cat never really notices how much trouble her buddy is in ― only how effortless, how glamorous, how sharply cheekboned she is.

Cat has just moved to a dying town in Michigan with her mother, recently divorced, and her older brother, Jimmy, when she meets Marlena. The newly depleted family, struggling financially without Cat’s father, moved to find a cheaper life, but she is resentful about leaving her prep school and friends. In Silver Lake, Cat discovers, they have neighbors ― most notably Marlena, who is two years older than Cat, and Sal, Marlena’s little brother. Their mother is gone and their father more of a burden than a parent, so Marlena cares for him. Compared to Cat’s naïveté, Marlena appears all grown up. She wears T-shirts with the necks cut out. She has a cute boyfriend. She gets Cat to cut class and smoke pot and drink with her all day. 

For the awkward, nerdy girl Cat sees herself as being, a best friendship with an older girl like Marlena ― sharp, sarcastic, creative and gorgeous ― offers almost inconceivable excitement. Immediately, she remembers, there were signs that something wasn’t right, signs everywhere that she almost couldn’t have missed, except that she did. Marlena acts erratic, drinks too much, constantly skips school; her deadbeat father spends most of his time in a janky shed nearby, which Cat doesn’t realize at the time is a meth lab.

It’s not a spoiler to say that Marlena has died by the end of the novel. The novel reveals that almost immediately. But working up to how, or at least why, she wound up lying dead in a few inches of icy slush in the woods, is a more harrowing journey. She’s mixed up in an exploitative relationship with an older man. Sal is taken away from the family home after a visit from CPS, and Marlena struggles to win custody of him. She seems to physically deteriorate. Cat sees her as larger than life through all of this, untouchable; all she really sees in Marlena is someone she wants to be. As she goes over and over her indelible memories of the months she spent attached to her friend’s hip, she tries to pin down the moments when all was lost. When did her drug habits get too extreme? When did she lose hope of making it out?

Marlena is a confessional work, a narrator’s exhausted, fruitless self-excoriation. Like many women looking back on her teen years, Cat recalls not appreciating her mother enough, not noticing the shit going on in her friends’ lives, not looking outside herself.

Beyond the exhilarating and terrifying evolution of the girls’ friendship, Buntin excels at capturing the sensations of girlhood. Cat tries booze, and drugs. She runs through the woods barefoot and comes back with feet embedded with grit. She feels vague sexual stirrings that she can’t cope with, though she tries. She masturbates unsuccessfully in bed, remembering later how

sweat broke out along my upper lip and around my temples. I threw the covers off my body and pushed my pants partway down, still rubbing myself over my underwear […] I pressed into myself harder, but the urgency ebbed and the feeling turned back into a tingle. I removed my hand and covered my eyes with my palms. My fingers smelled. I pinched the skin on my upper arm, tugging it away from the bone. Flabby. Flabby and gross.

At every turn, Buntin’s prose flows with the easy, confident rhythms of an accomplished writer, and though there’s really no mystery in the narrative, it reads nearly as compulsively as a thriller. As authors of what’s been morbidly dubbed “sick lit” know, the shocking, inexplicable juxtaposition of youth’s limitless potential and a central figure’s looming death imbues every moment with tension.

The tale of two friends, one who succeeds and one who fails, isn’t new ― it’s the entire focus of Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan books. But it remains fascinating nonetheless, especially in Buntin’s capable hands. It’s an inescapable fact that the tightest of bonds can’t paper over gulfs that open up between people as time passes; circumstances change, and life tears at our friendships. In the case of Marlena, the breach is more abrupt, more total. Cat’s realization that there are other forces in the world more powerful than her oaths of friendship is a coming-of-age, but also emotionally stunting. The trauma keeps her suspended in the past, hoping one day to understand it.

The Bottom Line:

Marlena’s vivid portrait of a friendship between two teenage girls in a troubled community ― one who made out, and one who didn’t ― viscerally captures the sensations and heartaches of adolescence.

What other reviewers think:

PW: “In her impressive debut novel, Buntin displays a remarkable control of tone and narrative arc.”

Kirkus: “Sensitive and smart and arrestingly beautiful, debut novelist Buntin’s tale of the friendship between two girls in the woods of Northern Michigan makes coming-of-age stories feel both urgent and new.”

Who wrote it?

Marlena is Julie Buntin’s debut novel. She is the director of writing programs at Catapult, and she has been published in The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, Slate, and more. 

Who will read it?

Readers who love realistic novels about female friendship, such as fans of the Neapolitan novels. 

Opening lines:

“Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are. I switch off my apartment light and she comes with the dark. The train’s eye widens in the tunnel and there she is on the tracks, blond hair swinging. One of our old songs starts playing and I lose myself right in the middle of the cereal aisle. Sometimes, late at night, when I’m fumbling with the key outside my apartment door, my eyes meet my reflection in the hallway mirror and I see her, waiting.”

Notable passage:

“So, very quickly, as you can see, in no more than a matter of weeks, she was my best friend. I was the first person, she told me, whose brain moved as quickly as hers, who got the weird things she said, her jokes, her vile, made-up swears, and could sharpen them with my own. A best friend is a magic thing, like finding a stump full of water that will make you live forever, or wandering into a field overrun by unicorns, or standing in a wardrobe one minute and a snowy forest the next.”

Marlena
By Julie Buntin
Henry Holt, $26.00
Published April 4, 2017

The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

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WASHINGTON ― The standoff over Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch was headed for a historic end Thursday, with Democrats prepared to filibuster President Donald Trump’s court pick and Republicans ready to execute a “nuclear option” rules change to break the blockade.

The nuclear option is a string of procedural moves that allows a Senate majority to change long-standing rules with a simple majority, or 51 votes. Those rules normally require a two-thirds vote to change. And it normally takes 60 votes to end a filibuster, but Republicans hold only 52 seats.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) opened the session blaming Democrats for the showdown.

“Our Democratic colleagues appeared poised to block this incredible nominee with the first partisan filibuster in American history,” McConnell said Thursday morning.

He did not mention the Republicans’ blockade last year of President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, who was the first nominee not granted a hearing ― much less a vote.

Nevertheless, McConnell accused Democrats of playing politics with Gorsuch, whom the Democrats say is too ideological and conservative.

“This isn’t really about the nominee anyway. The opposition to this nominee is really more about the man who nominated him, and the party he represents,” McConnell said. “It’s part of a much larger story, another escalation in the left’s never-ending drive to politicize the courts and the confirmation process.”

McConnell said the goal of Democrats was nothing less than “securing raw power no matter the cost to the country or the institution.”

Democrats, meanwhile, held a press conference urging Republicans not to blow up the filibuster rule to get Gorsuch through.

“If Trump wins, it will only be because he wrecked the rules so he could win. And he was aided and abetted by the Republican leadership,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said to a group of cheering progressive supporters.

Blumenthal said Democrats know they can’t ultimately stop Gorsuch from being confirmed, but they feel they are doing the right thing by fighting him to the bitter end.

“We may lose today,” he said. “But we win in adhering to basic core principles and conscience.”

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NEW YORK ― Nigerian author and feminist activist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie expressed her strong support for Planned Parenthood and its president, Cecile Richards, on Wednesday night.

At the beginning of a discussion on how to raise feminist children at Tina Brown’s Women in the World Summit, moderator Katie Couric asked both Richards and Adichie about the recent attacks on women’s health care and Planned Parenthood specifically. Couric cited the failed attempt to defund the health care organization through the American Health Care Act (which never even came to a vote), as well as the expansion of the global gag rule and the recent Congressional decision to allow states to withhold Title X family planning money from Planned Parenthood. 

A few minutes into the conversation, Couric asked Adichie whether she thought that the outsize number of attacks on Planned Parenthood were actually about resistance to the progress women have made in the U.S. 

“I think that Planned Parenthood represents so much,” said Adichie. “It represents all the progress that American women have made, and I think it also in some ways represents the idea that women can be sexual beings.”

She continued:

Because I think there’s a lot of about the discourse that really is about not just controlling women’s bodies, but also saying that women cannot be sexual without consequences in a way that men can. And I think that Planned Parenthood has become a symbol for all of that, and it’s just terrible how it’s constantly being attacked.

As Richards pointed out during the discussion, despite the complex symbol Planed Parenthood has become, at the end of the day, people want access to affordable health care. A January poll by Quinnipiac University found that 62 percent of voters opposed defunding Planned Parenthood, and 70 percent of voters support Roe v. Wade.

“The more politicians go after women’s health care, the more support for Planned Parenthood grows,” she said, pointing out that many Planned Parenthood patients are also Trump supporters.

“We see everybody in this country,” Richards said. “And folks don’t come to us to make a political statement. They come because they need access to affordable health care, and that’s not a partisan issue in America. And it certainly shouldn’t be. And I wish the U.S. Congress would understand that.”

(Watch the above video starting at around 4:00 to see Adichie’s comments on Planned Parenthood.)

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