The Burning Girl

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud (2017)

Claire Messud's newest novel is essentially a character study about a teenage girl named Cassie, told from the viewpoint of her friend Julia. They've known each other almost their whole lives, and were best friends until drifting apart in middle school. Their families are very different; Julia, with a stable family, destined for college, and Cassie with her religious and protective single mother. Cassie's mother begins a relationship with a local doctor named Anders Shute, and when he moves in, the walls start closing in on Cassie. As her freedoms are taken away one by one, she becomes consumed with the idea of her biological father and enters a downward spiral that Julia feels helpless to stop.

The girls first meet Anders Shute after Cassie is bitten by a pit bull at a shelter where they volunteer. (Important note: it was her fault, though I'm annoyed that the pits were treated in a stereotypical "they're so dangerous!" way in this book.) Dr. Shute patches her up, but his slightly odd demeanor casts an ominous pall over the situation that extends to his later relationship with Cassie's mother. There's an implication that he may have inappropriate feelings for Cassie and may have deliberately sought her mother for a relationship to be closer to Cassie.

We never quite get a handle on Anders Shute, nor do we on Cassie herself, and that's one of the themes of this short book: you never really know another person. Julia observes that life is theater, and we all play roles. They may change over time, but we always choose what we let others see. To her, what's happening with Cassie is rather a mystery, just as many situations around us - especially when we're young and adults keep a lot from us - remain partially shrouded and unfathomable.

In keeping with the rather dark tone of the book, Julia and Cassie spent a lot of time visiting an abandoned mental asylum at the height of their friendship. (As one does - in my pre-teen years it was an abandoned house with lots of interesting stuff left behind from the previous inhabitants.) One of my favorite passages in the book was Julia speculating about what happened to the asylum's residents:

"In twenty years, they couldn't all have died - but even if they had, the world wasn't getting any less crazy. So the dying generation of crazies was being replaced all the time by new crazies, a rolling population of lunatics as constant as the tides. Unless it wasn't individuals that changed but society itself: they changed the laws, they closed the asylums, and suddenly the crazies weren't crazy anymore. Maybe when society changed it was decided, somehow, that they never had been crazy; it had all been a category mistake....That would mean you couldn't be sure about things. Better to believe that sane people were sane and crazy people were crazy and you could put the types of people on opposites sides of a wall and keep them separate, clean and tidy. Without that, where did the lunatics go? Where had they gone? Were they among us? Were they us?"

The reviews of this novel seem mixed, and the average rating on Goodreads rather low, but I quite liked it. It was dark, sad, and ominous, and Messud's prose was a pleasure to read. Her only other book I've read was The Woman Upstairs, and I like this one better but stylistically they're comparable. If you liked The Woman Upstairs, I would recommend trying The Burning Girl.

The Woman Upstairs

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud (2013)

Once a striving artist, Nora is now an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, MA. She lives by herself in an apartment where she is quiet and neat and a good neighbor - the "woman upstairs" who nobody really notices. When a new student shows up in her classroom, she ends up befriending the whole family. They are from Paris, just here for a year while the husband, Skandar, teaches at Harvard. His wife, Sirena, is an artist and she and Nora decide to split some studio space. Nora is increasingly drawn to the family, to each of them individually, becoming consumed by her strengthening obsession.

Messud's writing is beautiful - her word choices and her descriptions were the best part of this novel for me, especially the descriptions of Nora's and Sirena's art projects. The story is compelling in its way - a woman coming to grips with growing older alone, her growing bitterness, and an unhealthy obsession with a family - but it didn't really grab me.

I didn't especially like Nora, but found her recognizable in the way that many women my age will. This made it painful to read. When she first quoted from "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" it brought me back to my college days and early 20s when I found that song sad and wistful, but it didn't yet apply to me. Now it does. Now that I'm around Nora's age I, too, must come to grips with everything I won't do and that is not a happy thought. Nora is single and failing at her art and she's teaching at an elementary school - because she must do something to earn money - and the worst part is that I can see her sabotaging herself through the entire story.  It's strange to me to obsess over anyone the way Nora did, much less an entire family, so I don't know what to think about her relationship with the Shahids. But the trajectory was well-crafted, from Nora's first meeting with Sirena through the final betrayal.

The story takes place in areas I'm very familiar with. Nora lives in my old Cambridge neighborhood and visits some of my old haunts, like Hi Rise and Formaggio. Her studio is near my current neighborhood in Somerville, and in fact I've gone to Open Studios in the buildings where her studio was. It's always a pleasant distraction to recognize real locations in fiction, and strange to see familiar places through different eyes.

The Woman Upstairs was a pretty hot book when it first came out last year, garnering rave reviews and becoming quite popular and highly-requested (at least in my library system). It was pretty good, but I'm not sure why it took off the way it did. It's not, I don't know, sexy or new or exciting or controversial, and I don't think she has the sort of name recognition that makes everyone flock to her books (though now she might), but obviously there was something compelling about it to a lot of people. I thought it was good, and her eloquent writing elevates it a bit more, but I don't think it's a book that will stick with me.