What She Saw... by Lucinda Rosenfeld is Chick-Chic Lit of a Low Order
So you were bred to have grand goals for yourself, and while you sat in that provincial, backwoods high school that your parents sent you to because they were too sensitive to "class hegemonies" (and cheap) to send you to the good private school your talents deserved, you dreamed about getting to New York where you'd become a Dorothy Parker or a Nora Ephron, or (because when you think about it, those dames were not all that great-looking) a Candace Bushnell. (Candace Bushnell! There's a name to conjure with. Who cared if she could write; she became a brand! A line of shoes and handbags to follow!)
Eventually you got to New York where you found an appropriately grotty Lower East Side garret (great material there!), registered at temp agencies till you found one that could ignore your abysmal typing, and sometimes you shoplifted (it's called having an interesting past!) to get through the lean times between parental care packages. Or maybe there was an angel, a guy you chatted up at an "Ethics in Journalism'" seminar at Columbia, for instance, who was able to shoehorn you into a low-paying but less embarrassing job as an assistant at Random House or Mademoiselle.
And there you molder. Because it turns out (future novel epiphany moment, number one) that New York City is, in fact, where all the girls like you go. (The dumber and better-looking ones go to L.A.) Millions of them, all more ruthless than the next?and many with huge trustfund war chests to finance long wars of attrition in their campaign to rule New York's media world. Everybody's grasping at the same brass ring. Money is good, but deep down the real lust is more primitive and inchoate; it's really for a certain kind of all-embracing, never-wavering attention. (A theory: Maybe attentive parents create attention junkies, attention junkies who then suffer an especially huge "narcissistic insult" when they confront the surging people tides of New York City.)
I know that girl a bit too well. I bet you, reader, know her too, and Sisters of the Cubicles, I'm here to tell you to hang in there! After the truly mind-boggling success of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (it has sold at least four million copies and has been translated into umpteen languages) and runners-up Sex and the City and The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing (which was on the New York Times bestseller list) and, closer to home, Amy Sohn's Run Catch Kiss, this genre (how about we call it "chick chic") has meant that any young woman, however uneventful her life has been so far (Bridget Jones was about a chubby magazine editorial assistant who spends her days trying to lose weight and failing and mooning after various guys in her department), has a shot at this brass ring?provided you are cute enough for the promotion circuit (no Cynthia Ozick-baggy cardigan-types allowed), have created a protagonist who lives in a major city (that would be New York or London), exude the right sort of hip (i.e., ironic about the whole subject of hip and your own hipness) and have made a worthy effort to, as Naomi Wolf once exhorted, "get in touch with your inner slut," which means that you should have had sex with at least a couple of guys and be willing to throw around unladylike phrases like "blowjob" and "take it in the ass" in your manuscript so that blurbers will be able to burble about the "edginess" in your writing.
Phoebe Fine, the protagonist of What She Saw..., is this "certain type of upper-middle class girl" to, like, the power of 10, and the book, Lucinda Rosenfeld says, "tell[s] [Phoebe's] story through fifteen encounters with fifteen different guys... So much of a woman's experience is shaped by the interplay with men," says Rosenfeld, who is 30 and used to be a NightLife columnist for the New York Post. "It seemed like a cool ordering principle." (The book's subtitle, too long to put in the heading of a book review, underlines the "ordering principle" and Phoebe's obsessive focus on using boyfriends as the measure of her self-worth: The rest of the title is "in..." and then a list of male names, Phoebe's more significant crushes and hookups, numbered 1 through 15.)
We first meet Phoebe at grade-school age. Rosenfeld grew up in suburban New Jersey, and Phoebe also lives in some bleak, claustrophobic land of malls and tenplexes and highways north of New York City; her amusingly sketched parents are "tea-drinker types," free-spirited musicians (Rosenfeld's father was a professional cellist; Phoebe Fine's is "a freelance oboist") who allow the children to call them by their first names, own a black-and-white tv "the size of a toaster oven," "prefer Masterpiece Theater and gardening to contact sports" and drape drying pieces of used aluminum foil and plastic wrap up around the kitchen so they may be used again. Phoebe's mom Roberta buys poly/cotton sheets, knits vests for dad and gets food caught in her long, free-flowing hair. You know the type, completely above reproach but an endless embarrassment.
The book then follows Fine through public grade school (1. Roger Mancuso, 2. Günther Hopstock) then high school (3. Jason Barry Gold and 4. Spitty Clark) and college (Fine goes to a made-up place called Hoover University; Rosenfeld went to Cornell) to New York. Grade-school days are mostly spent thinking about boys, clothes and her weight; the same is true for high school and college. In New York not much changes except that Fine is now temping, shoplifting on her lunch hour to supplement her paltry wages, living with a sort of ditzy surfer-dude/aspiring rock musician while she thinks about other boys, better boys...and her weight. Toward the end of the book she gets a job at a nonprofit foundation (like the author) and, like the author, moves to a pastoral part of Brooklyn, where it is implied she has finally found happiness, the ability to love, to nest, all that, with a Mr. Right type named Bo Pierce who, after four lines of description of what he's wearing, is hurriedly described as having "an aura of rage-tinged melancholy hovering in the foreground of his all-American good looks."
We know that this is the Last Chapter, the end of what this book's editor probably hoped was a dramatic arc about immaturity to growth, because the omniscient narrator starts the chapter with a profound-sounding, but for me totally inscrutable, speech about:
"Lust. She'd lived long enough to know a little about the games it plays with our hearts and with our heads?the way it stamps whimsy with a sense of the inevitable. And proleptically rationalized the damage it has yet to do... But then lust is rarely an uninvited guest. Rather it tends to limit its visits to those who make themselves open to its demented logic, its rose-tinted guile."
Right. You might get the idea that Phoebe is a dull girl?or at least just a very ordinary girl. She is both. But that should not be a problem. The central girl in the chick chic genre is always a bit of a dim bulb. Maybe it's just because we're privy to their self-critical interior monologues, maybe starting out fairly hopeless allows the writer to arrange a plot around her shaky path to emotional maturity, maybe it's because editors feel that the hoi polloi out there in flyover land will feel more comfortable with a character who is not quite the perfect, pulled-together New York career girl, but the protagonists in this genre have actually tended to be more passive, more procrastinating and more immature than real-life young-woman-struggling-to-make-it-in-the-big-city types. But what makes, say, Anna Maxted's Getting Over It more engrossing than What She Saw... is that eventually you begin to care what happens to Maxted's feckless Helen?like a younger sister you want to lecture?while the endlessly self-centered Phoebe just stays annoying. Obviously the chick chic genre is sort of like freeze-dried soup mix. The standard ingredients can be all there, in the little foil envelope, but something special is needed to...to make the vegetables puff out like normal ones and to get that nice oil sheen on the top and to, you know, make it get all hot and stuff.
Big talent helps. Helen Fielding is a superb humorist and she made Diaries fall-off-your-chair funny. Melissa Bank and Anna Maxted are superb writers?and superb novelists?who create image after image which drop by drop flesh out and create what seems like living, breathing worlds. But What She Saw... never rehydrates and plumps up into a juicy, steamy, actual novel. The ingredients just sort of sit there freeze-dried, waiting for...what? It felt to me they waited for time, effort and that decidedly uncool, unhip New York girl quality of passion. I mean passionate about the attempt to get it right, maybe just getting Jason Barry Gold's sports jacket the right shade of Paramus mall blue.
I blame some of the inert quality on Rosenfeld's decision to use "the cool organizing principle" of one guy per chapter. They whip by so quickly that we only know them as Central Casting types: the Jewish princeling, the guy from the other side of the tracks, the frat guy who yells stuff like "Party!" a lot, the grungy aspiring musician who lives on the Lower East Side. Apparently this was what Rosenfeld intended. These are men as seen by a young woman who isn't really interested in other people. The men are props, audiences, symbols, notches in a ledger. She's said in an interview that when she was in college she was "trying on identities through trying on different outfits and, in a weird way, trying out different guys. The guys were almost like the clothes."
Okay, that's Phoebe's mind-set and an accurate depiction of the way some kinds of women view men. Nevertheless, this leaves us alone with Phoebe, with her wrong-end-of-the-telescope point of view and the repetitive formula of new crush, new guy, new dates, new sexual event, breakup. Even the astute voiceover of the omniscient narrator explaining and often ridiculing Phoebe doesn't help. It gets numbing.
Phoebe's drone is an accurate depiction of what many female brains sound like in their idiocy-prone teens and 20s, and it's so accurately reproduced that it's boring. Who wants to live with a Phoebe for the two or so hours it takes to read this book? And the chapters never come together as a novel; there is a disjointed feel, as if Rosenfeld were doing finger exercises, trying this particular story (a neurotic girl and her empty relationships), making slight changes every time, until she had a big clump of manuscript that looked novelish to some eager editor out there. In fact, Rosenfeld has said in interviews that she would write stories while on temp assignments. Maybe this is merely a collection of those exercises.
There are glimpses here and there of a talent that could do more. Rosenfeld is very smart playing the narrator who analyzes why Phoebe, for instance, decides to seduce her assistant professor of her comparative literature simply because he is the new assistant professor and he's a grownup and has a beard and is married. Phoebe is narcissistic to a near pathological degree?as so many young women are in the wilderness of their teens and early 20s?and her interior monologues alternating between grandiosity and self-loathing (sometimes Phoebe feels "like hot shit, sometimes just like shit? City life had that effect on Phoebe?the effect of spontaneous self-aggrandizement that degenerated into self-disgust at the smallest of provocations, the most random of provocations") will make any woman who's been 20 in wealthy peacetime America smite her forehead and groan. Dreary Paramus-area New Jersey is entertainingly described, and there is an hilariously acute description of temp agencies and the typical temp job.
Still, it turns out this chick chic book isn't as easy to pull off as it looks. Cubicle Girls out there (working on your short stories or your feature article proposals on your half-hour lunch break), use this book as an example of what you have to push beyond. You've got to work your ass off and/or be as brave and original as Tama Janowitz or as funny as Helen Fielding or as gifted and passionate as Anna Maxted and Melissa Bank.