Review--Stop That Girl by Elizabeth McKenzie

Parts of Elizabeth McKenzie's new "novel in stories," Stop that Girl, have appeared in the lit journals ZYZZYVA and The Threepenny Review, as well as the anthology The Best American Nonrequired Reading. That's some pretty good company, and this company creates high expectations for McKenzie's first novel, but Stop that Girl doesn't disappoint. Here's my review.

Toward the end of Stop that Girl, Allen Ginsburg (the only celebrity cameo) is asked “What makes good art?” He responds with "locate particulars of emotion recollected in tranquility" (cribbing from Wordsowrth) and "find the vocal origin in your throat the corresponds with the mental image," two things which, fittingly, Stop that Girl does exceedingly well.

Stop that Girl is a “novel in stories,” a collection of moments from the life of a girl, Ann Ransom, growing up in

Southern California

in the ‘60s. Perhaps seven or eight of the book’s nine stories could work as stand-alone pieces, but owing that the stories eschew epiphany in favor of evoking the timelessness of familial problems, of issues that are never really solved, they garner greater resonance from being collected as a novel.

In the novel’s opening story, Ann’s divorced mother has just remarried and become pregnant, and Ann, a little girl of eight, is bundled off to spend the summer with her eccentric grandmother, Dr. Frost. Ann is promptly dragged to

Europe

where her married grandmother attends a medical conference and enjoys another chapter in a periodic liaison with Dr. Von Allsberg while Ann is casually disregarded until, in an ill-fated piggy-back ride attempt, Ann breaks her grandmother’s arm. The story ends when Ann, who has just been greeted at the airport by her mother and stepfather, grabs her newborn half-sister and leads her parents on a chase.

This opening episode sets the tone. McKenzie’s idealistic yet angry and confused heroine repeatedly tries to leverage attention and understanding by simply running at top speed in whatever direction seems best.

It was the beginning of my future, and I had the thought at that moment there was no one in the world who would ever understand my version of things. I plunged through the crowd, holding my sister close to me. I heard my mother crying out, my grandmother barking commands, and Roy Weeks shouting, "Stop that girl!" But no one seemed to connect them to me, so no one stood in my way.

In Stop that girl's first seven stories, McKenzie writes in quiet, unadorned language. There’s a danger with this kind of writing, that the stories will flow too quickly and, like water’s transparent, colorless, tasteless, textureless essence, pass through barely felt. It requires readers to participate with a conscientious eye and a lively sense of empathy, but it also requires an author who is able to reward such diligence.

It’s a tough thing to do, to write stories out of the airiest of materials and yet infuse them with gravity. This was something Hemingway did very well. You can dash through page after page of his books in minutes and suddenly get stuck on one sentence that pulls down everything around it like a Sumo wrestler jumping into a trampoline. In Stop that Girl, McKenzie sometimes succeeds in this and sometimes not. Some of the stories pass through without a hitch and others contain remarks that appear casual but pop up, full of meaning beyond face value. These innocuous remarks season McKenzie’s soft stories with portentous thuds that fire off connections in a reader’s mind. They also occasionally ignite memories of one’s own childhood.

Undoubtedly, these stories are far more interesting as interlocking strands of a life than as individual threads. The story with Ginsburg, the last to depict Ann’s childhood, is one that I think succeeds as a stand-alone piece. Ann is in college, attempting to wrest an interview from Ginsburg for a literary journal she and a friend have started. She has dreams of moving east after graduation and living a bohemian life while working for a prestigious journal. Seemingly, Ann has finally overcome the doubt and insecurity that characterized her childhood and is at last prepared to take her life in hand in a measured and mature way. She is on the threshold of adulthood, and if she does not have answers, Ann at least has a plan and the resources and determination to see it through.

How strange then that the final two stories in this life depict a muted housewife still as at the mercy of the world as the child Ann, but only in different ways. These last two stories are a stylistic departure from the previous seven in that they are written with none of the airy superficiality that characterized the remembrances of Ann’s childhood. Instead the paragraphs are long and laden with psychological ruminations, the infrastructure of an adult wrestling with her neuroses. These stories still present Ann’s life as quirky and different, but where that quirkiness was joyful in Ann’s childhood, it now feels desperate and depressing.

These last two stories offer up plainly all the poignancy and gravity that the foregoing seven carefully disguised. The entire book is written as a remembrance. Although never explicitly stated, the narrator is clearly the adult Ann looking back at her life, and perhaps the stories she remembers from her childhood are written as they are because they seem brighter to her. Perhaps only we, the reader, the outside observer, can see the truth that a saddened Ann misses in her reminiscences of a better time. Perhaps the final two stories are so laden with detail because only now, grown-up and dispirited by the life that has been meted out to her, Ann has begun to wonder where she went wrong. Without spoiling anything, I can say that the book ends on a sincere note, one that is true to the Ann that McKenzie has created, a girl and a woman who always did her own thing.

Comments

[patricia]

Excellent review. Much more thorough than mine. Now I'm embarrased.