SERIOUS GIRLS
By Maxine Swann
Picador, $23, 229 pages
REVIEWED BY JENNIFER RESTAK
Maxine Swann’s first novel, “Serious Girls” reflects the finely-honed, delicate sensibility of two girls in the bloom of youth. Swann possesses a musical ear for language, evoking textures, smells and feelings with the intensity of a young girl first experiencing them. An autumnal tale, its colors are copper, green and brown.
Maya, the young girl to whom this story belongs, is sent to a prestigious Northeastern boarding school by her wealthy grandmother, who sends the first of many large checks to her with a note stating, “you must take French.” Maya’s friend Roe, raised by a stern military father in a small Georgia town, attends the school on scholarship. She approaches Maya one day with a simple greeting: “I’m Roe. Come see what I’ve found.”
Maya follows Roe to a small graveyard “on the edge of the playing fields, right where the woods begin.” The two friends frequent the graveyard at dusk beneath a shimmering copper beech tree to muse dreamily on existential issues, like what it means to be a person, what makes up a human soul, and when their lives will begin. As this rich coming-of-age tale unfolds, they begin their exploration.
Maya notices that when she isn’t wearing her uniform, Roe wears men’s clothes, found in thrift shops and in her father’s closet at home. “Since arriving at school, I no longer know what I wear,” says Maya, who longs to appear as original as Roe. One day, when in a thrift store, “a sliver of pale green” catches Maya’s eye.
It is, simply, a dress. But when Maya puts it on, she is overcome by a new sense of herself, as though she has found the “unquestionable solution to a predicament.” On weekends, she steals away from the pastoral haven of school to explore New York City, together with Roe, and later, alone.
The city streets, “gleaming and full of shadows,” the rush of horns and flicker of lights transform Maya from a schoolgirl to a hunter, sharp and alert. She pursues a brooding man she spots in a West Side diner. “I think about Arthur, his body, his skin, smooth and tense, the muscles beneath it clutching the bone.”
She plays different roles with him, delivering whatever performance the circumstance requires, “his sister, his friend, an unknown girl passing through town, from the country, yes, or else older, a woman … I can adjust my expressions, my movements, my manner of speaking to portray any of these things.”
The timbre of the novel changes from a tango to a march as Maya, a protean seductress, plunges into a relationship with Arthur. Dialogue gives way to internal monologue as Maya finds herself trapped under the many faces she assumes.
Touring the cathedrals of France with Arthur over the summer vacation, Maya finds herself unable to speak. “The force of Arthur paralyses me … I see his gargoyle face everywhere … I feel nostalgic for myself.” Maya’s green dress feels dirty, the fabric oily against her skin.
Dressed in Arthur’s clothes, she ventures outside one afternoon in secret, feeling free and hopeful, almost the hunter again, in her disguise. Her elation gives way to panic when she loses her bearings among the twisted streets of Paris, returning to their hotel room exhausted and ashamed.
Meanwhile, the reader learns that Roe, too, has lost her way, stumbling into a romance marked by sudden bursts of violence. “Happily shaken up” at first, Roe attributes the appeal of her relationship with a quiet boy from town to “the intensity of those moments when Jesse’s temper showed itself.” That is, until her father drives hundreds of miles by instinct to rescue her from fatal injury.
To this reader’s great disturbance, Roe finds some power in her role as victim. As Maya recalls it, “the bruises are great weapons against him. All she has to do is sit there and be bruised.”
“Serious Girls” reads like a secret diary of a young confessional poet, who lets her guard down only on the page. Miss Swann holds the reader captivated in a dream-like, impressionistic world of images symbolic of Maya’s internal state. The surreal world she inhabits is charged, it turns out, with latent meaning.
This unusual first novel is more than a story of an adolescent coming of age. It is, in fact, a portrait of an artist, telling of both the external and internal events leading Maya to her first act of creation.
Nature provides rich metaphor for Maya’s emotional state and ultimately, release. In Paris with Arthur, she sees the gnarled arms of weeds and branches twisting between stones like writhing limbs. In the French countryside, she is stunned by trees that look “amputated … their limbs cut off low. I want to tear my eyes away, but I can’t.”
Maya dreams one night that she is a tree. “I wake up, it’s dawn, and feel for a moment as if I’m standing on a hilltop in the light and wind.”
The dream, a premonition, she reflects later, lights the way to her escape. Early one morning, Maya sneaks quietly out of their cottage, and catches a train back to Paris. She checks herself into a hotel and sleeps deeply, “in a way I’ve never slept before,” regenerating her strength. And like the tree, she sprouts new limbs.
One day, in a cafe, she asks the waiter for a piece of paper and, she writes. “I write what happened from the beginning, about Roe and how we met and Arthur and all that I lived on this trip … I feel that I have all the words reserved within me.”
Through the liberating act of writing Maya gains a steadier sense of herself. Reunited at school in September, Roe and Maya take their ritual walk through the graveyard and sit underneath the copper beech tree. Maya peers closely into the tree bark and, astonished, remarks, “there’s a whole universe inside.”
Maya recognizes that she, like the tree, is a world unto herself, her experiences the rich soil nourishing the roots out of which her story springs. And she grounds herself. “I had what I had written. That seemed concrete.”
Jennifer Restak is a writer in New York City.
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