Emma Cline’s debut The Girls has created a stir this year, having gained a huge advance, a film option and high-level praise. The reviews, while appreciative, were somewhat muted and having read the book (no, devoured it) I can understand why.
‘She’s a better writer than Donna Tartt,’ a publishing friend said, adding that the story itself only merited a ‘so what’. I feel a tinge of regret that such a high-level literary style is married to such grungy subject matter, even though that very disjoint is no doubt the intended effect.
Cline has transposed the story of the Manson family to a fictional cultish commune, moving the location to the hills outside San Francisco. The Manson figure is the enigmatic (rather too enigmatic – he is underdrawn) Russell, and standing in for Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boy who briefly befriended Manson before backing away, is the unappealing Mitch Lewis, bloated and befuddled.
As the title indicates, Cline’s main focus is ‘the girls’, those endlessly puzzling, grinning, hand-holding murderesses whose breezy court demeanour appalled the world. In the months before going to boarding school, the 14-year-old protagonist, Evie, becomes embroiled in the cult, initially enthralled by Suzanne, one of Russell’s acolytes. Evie’s background is firmly and finely drawn: the wealthy divorced parents with too much going on in their own lives but who genuinely if uselessly seek to provide the unhappy girl with some structure and life skills. It’s a nice touch in a novel filled with unappetising men that her mother’s new boyfriend is a good guy.
The story is told from the perspective of Evie in middle age, now a drifting, unfulfilled person, still wistful about the big dreams that led her to follow the mad hippie guru in the first place. Prurient new acquaintances are slightly disappointed that she is relatively taintless of the group’s despicable crimes, even as they look down on her as a moral pygmy. Not much has changed in the years since the murders – men are still awful. The undercurrent of the book is Evie’s rage at the predicament of teenage girls in a masculine world, even as she acknowledges that being drawn/coerced into sex acts with Russell was not entirely unpleasant.
The trouble with even such slight attempts at mitigation, though, is a basic moral truth. Many, perhaps most teenage girls will suffer like Evie: the slights, the frights, the gropes, the creepy guys, the sad recognition that the world was never made with them in mind. But they don’t go on to commit or condone mass murder.
Also, although standards of hygiene were probably a little different in the Sixties to now, the description of the state of Russell’s ranch is so queasy-making that it gives the odd impression that a greater sensitivity to filth might just have inoculated Evie against the evil she embraces so gleefully.