GIRL’S GIRL, by Sonia Feldman
The sight of a teenage girl preening before a phone camera has become an emblem of moral panic. The preening leads to posting. The posting leads to a prolonged performance on social media. The performance, some say, leads to the social decay of a generation.
It may be true that kids these days should trade some screen time for, as they themselves put it, “touching grass.” But something important, and less discussed, dwells within the preening, the posting, the performance — something we adults cannot see: the thrilling construction of an identity.
It’s this version of becoming — the one that happens simultaneously online and IRL — that Sonia Feldman chronicles in her lustrous debut, “Girl’s Girl.” The novel, set over one humid summer in Ohio, follows a trio of 15-year-old best friends: Mina, our tentative and anxious narrator, the self-described “least chill person on earth”; the bold Margaret; and the reserved Eleanor.
At the start of the summer, the girls are maintaining the delicate balance of their triad. They have their rituals, digital and corporeal. They play The Sims, relishing impregnating their virtual avatars. They dance goofily at sleepovers. They confess their hookups in vivid detail (“no claim to fidelity could be higher than our own on each other”). They pose for many, many selfies.
Then the group cleaves. Margaret is the first to give a blow job and begins hanging out with her older, cooler cousin, which her friends learn only via social media. Eleanor and Mina kiss. Mina gets herself grounded for weeks that feel, to a teenager, like years.
The novel thrums with the delicious anxiety of “summer urgency,” as Mina calls it: “the sense that something had to happen to us, and we were wasting time if it didn’t.” Feldman brings an Austenian attentiveness to the foibles of suburban adolescence: the etiquette breach of abandoning your friend to find her own way to the bathroom at a summer fair; the treacherousness of leaving a hookup on read.
An argument over which of the girls’ Sims to kill off becomes an outlet for the brewing tensions — both sexual and sisterly — between Eleanor and Mina. “We’d caught ourselves in a strangeness that could not be easily dismissed,” Mina thinks as they shove each other. “When had we ever touched each other like that before? And I didn’t want it to stop either. … I wanted more of whatever there was between us, more of whatever it was she seemed determined to withhold.”
Later that night Mina’s mother betrays just how much adults miss about the intricacies of youth, asking, “Did you really spend the whole day playing on the computer?”
This is not a story about the great rupture of coming out, but a more nuanced look at how young lovers must invent their own kinds of courtship, in ways both universal and specifically queer. “I had so little evidence of how girls could love each other,” Mina thinks as her burgeoning sexual longing gives way to an overflowing new adult identity: “I needed to make more of myself so some of me wouldn’t belong to her.”
And so she does. As the novel progresses Mina develops a new language for the once “fuzzy” distinctions between her romantic love for Eleanor and her platonic love for Margaret. She starts masturbating and reading erotica about a fairy named Ginevra. She is the one to help Margaret locate her clitoris, in a clinical way.
“Desire is an impingement on interior life,” Feldman writes, and for her characters that desire encompasses more than just sex. As these girls stare at themselves in mirrors and phone screens, they also stare at one another; they learn to see — and love — more clearly.
As summer concludes, the girls snap one final picture: Margaret’s arm around Mina; Eleanor licking Mina’s face. “I thought of all the photos the three of us had ever taken, ever made visible on the internet,” Mina says. “I wondered if anyone would be able to tell what the picture meant about who we were to each other by looking at it.” The pleasure of “Girl’s Girl” is that it reveals the invisible jealousies, affections and gnawing needs lurking at the edge of so many seemingly trivial images of young womanhood.
GIRL’S GIRL | By Sonia Feldman | Dial Press | 244 pp. | $28
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