Hot in the City
On “Girls They Write Songs About,” by Carlene Bauer
This fierce and ambitious novel about the friendship between two women coming of age in 1990s-era New York City and beyond has sparked so many conflicting reactions in me — some logical, some emotional and irrational — that sorting through them has been its own, not unpleasant, exercise in critical thinking.
First, a disclaimer: Bauer is a close friend of a close friend of mine and so, by the transitive quality of such matters, a sometimes-sort-of friend herself, whose career I have been following avidly since her debut in 2009, a quirky, bristling memoir called Not That Kind of Girl, which I reviewed upon its publication in the long-gone L Magazine.
2009; a debut memoir; The L Magazine; to canny readers of urban cultural signifiers, this sentence alone conveys a piquant set of very specific associations. This is by way of saying that Bauer and I came to the city at about the same time, and around at the same age, with many of the same ideas about literary achievement and bohemia and artistic integrity that have been motivating ambitious and smart young people to come to New York City for over a century now. And Bauer is extremely, extremely good at conveying those associations, those memories, and those sensations: the heat rising from the streets of the still-grimy East Village, the scent of cigarette smoke in sour-smelling dive bars, the sharp back-and-forth conversation — a form of combat and flirtation, both — of people for whom music and literature and film are paramount. The novel defines one version of what it means to be Generation X.
The second disorienting element of the novel is the way that it, I think, poses questions about feminist ideals and about self-definition that are both unanswerable and impossible to ignore. It asks: What does it mean to be a good person? What does it mean to be a friend? What does it mean to be an artist? a writer? a woman artist writer? Its genius is to send its dual protagonists off in search of answers to these questions that, cruelly, cannot truly be answered. There is something pitiless in Bauer’s vision here that reminds me — and probably only me — of Henry James, of his way of winding up his toy-doll characters, male and female both, and then observing dispassionately as he sends them marching off into the abyss of ineluctable heartbreak (Molly Young, in the Times, commented upon the book’s “streaks of viciousness.”) When Bauer’s protagonist Charlotte, at age 38, broke, childless, single, stands in the burnished foyer of her friend’s lush, banker-financed house, burning with resentment, and then resentment of the resentment, she is enacting a set of choices that have all the promise and rewards of a steel bear trap. The friends’ two paths fork, as they must; neither fork ends in anything resembling happiness, which is the sign of a tragic vision.
What makes all of this worthwhile and affecting is the complete organicism of the narrative movement; what sounds schematic in description unfolds with the precision and inevitability of Greek tragedy. Part of Charlotte’s appeal is the quickness of her mind; she shares with many highly intelligent, possibly over-educated people the ability to almost immediately second-guess any decision or opinion. One can imagine one saying, “write a novel in which the female characters grapple with the implications and paradoxes of third-wave feminism”; but to actually do it is an accomplishment of a different order.
I so despise the formulaic, but I cannot resist pointing out a couple of weaknesses. Bauer is at times capable of unspooling passages of crushing lyrical beauty and keen psychological insight, but there are other times where the basic blocking out of actions and dialogues seems strangely clumsy. The second is that the roundelay of lovers who populate Charlotte’s romantic and erotic life begins to seem repetitive, even wearying; one or two fewer turns of the screw would have been emotionally sufficient, although it is possible that I am missing the point or perhaps just plumb wrong.
I am not wrong, however, about saying that this book is a love letter to a bygone city, about people aging out of their dreams, and like all love letters it is verbose, messy, sexy, poignant, desperate, and finally, heart-breaking. As the icon of a wholly different generation once sang, it’s about people who “drink too much, smoke too much, talk too loud, and don’t get enough sleep.”
