"The Burning Girl," by Claire Messud

Fiction about young girls and their friendships is important, and I am happy to find such novels when they take those girls and those friendships seriously. Claire Messud, an undeniably serious writer (see, for example, “The Emperor’s Children” and “The Woman Upstairs,” the latter of which I posted about here on 5/29/13), has written about such a friendship in “The Burning Girl” (W.W. Norton, 2017). The narrator, Julia, looks back on her long, intense childhood friendship with Cassie, a friendship that ended four years earlier in late middle school when the two drifted away from each other and then experienced a dreadful event that brought them together in a way that their friendship could not survive. The two girls had always been extremely close, despite somewhat different family backgrounds. They felt they could almost read each other's minds. Julia’s family is more traditional; her loving parents are still married and middle-class. Cassie’s single mother is also loving, and a little less middle-class; Cassie's father died when she was very young. Some of the events the two girls go through are the usual ones of early adolescence, but nothing is “usual” about Messud’s dead-on description. The friendship starts to go awry when Cassie first endures the entrance into her life of her mother’s new and controlling boyfriend, and is further derailed as she imagines that her father might still be alive, which belief preoccupies her and leads to trouble. There is also a sort of complicated competition for a boy, Peter. Messud’s achievement in this novel is not so much about the specifics of the plot (although it is a compelling one) as it is about its portrayal of girls’ lives and relationships at that critical and delicate time period when they are emerging from childhood. Adults often do not take the intensity of girls’ (or perhaps of boys’ either) feelings and experiences as seriously as they should. Those adults vaguely remember some of this, but experiences and feelings fade, and we perhaps downplay their importance and their longterm influences on us. We may remember very well that those years were intense, but we can’t really recapture the depths and textures of that intensity, and life moves on. It is both pleasurable and painful to be reminded by this very evocative portrayal of what those years can be like.