~ The Burning Girl, by Claire Messud ~
Published in 2017, this is the most recent of Messud’s novels. I had enjoyed her other novels previously, particularly The Woman Upstairs, but this I think is quite Messud’s best – the most understated and the most crafted too. The Burning Girl has at its heart teenaged friendship between 2 girls, some of the most complicated and intense of relationships.
At 10 years old, Julia and Cassie have been friends from before they could remember. But their lives and backgrounds are very different – Julia has loving, professional parents and a steady home life. Cassie does not know her father, and was brought up by her single mum, Bev, who is a hospice worker and an intensely religious woman. Julia is studious, hard-working, dependable, while Cassie is impetuous, fearless, a daredevil. They are as different in personality as they are physically – Julia larger framed with dark curls; Cassie slight and white blond. Nevertheless, at aged 10, the two are inseparable.
The girls’ last summer of close friendship is one full of childhood exploration and adventure, and Messud’s writing is luminous as she describes their surroundings, the landscape a reflection on the landscape of their friendship:
The woods around Royston are great for those kinds of games. There are clearings in the trees, and huge slabs of rocks like tables, fallen logs to serve as benches, rocky overhangs underneath which you can build a little camp which will stay dry in all but the heaviest rainfall. They are not impenetrable, not a Hansel and Gretel forest, but a forest where the sunlight falls green and dappled to the soft piney ground, where surprising toadstools sprout in clumps – red flat plates or piled cream ruffles, tiny yellow shiny bulbs, almost slick – and invisible birds call to one another in the high branches overhead.
p30
At school in 7th grade, their lives begin to diverge, with Cassie not being particularly academically inclined, and Julia the opposite. They join different activities, and have different friends. Julia has a crush on a boy who falls in love with Cassie. Nevertheless, both girls acknowledge an old loyalty to each other even as they lead their ever more divergent lives. Messud’s writing downplays drama with tremendous control and skill. Julia is aware of Cassie’s increasingly troubled life, her fraught relationship with both her mother and stepfather, her growing pain and unhappiness. Nevertheless, she feels helpless to intervene, and unable to reach out to or reach Cassie. When things reach a head, Cassie runs away, not once but twice. In attempting to recover Cassie, Julia extends her own journey of self-discovery; the working out of her close relationships one of the key channels of self-development.
Julia’s musings beautifully capture the growing pains of an intelligent, thoughtful young teen:
You get to middle school and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you’re suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can’t ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself.
p93
This is a coming-of-age novel, delicately sketched and charmingly rendered, of experience encroaching bit by bit on innocence, without fuss, without histrionics, but deeply felt. I eagerly await Messud’s next novel.
Recent Comments