Lucky Girls, lucky reader

Here are five stories, set in Southeast Asia and on the Indian subcontinent-each one bearing the weight and substance of a short novella-narrated by young women who find themselves, often as expatriates, face to face with the compelling circumstances of adult love. Living in unfamiliar places, according to new and often frightening rules, these characters become vulnerable in unexpected ways-and learn, as a result, to articulate the romantic attraction to landscapes and cultures that are strange to them.

Reading the inside flap of Nell Freudenberger’s Lucky Girls I wondered if it describes a different book. Perhaps it’s necessary to highlight the exotic and the unknown to sell fiction these days (“Indian subcontinent'” got me, I admit), but these stories would work just as well in any setting. Geography becomes irrelevant as Freudenberger draws the reader into the lives and heads of her characters. What the book jacket does get right are the silhouettes. If you look closely, there are just enough details to start forming impressions about these faceless girls, but to find out more, we have to let them tell their own stories.

None of the stories disappoint, which alone sets this debut collection apart from others by new, young, over-hyped authors. Through refreshingly uncluttered prose and uncontrived dialogue, Freudenberger brings us stories of unhappy people left scarred by the actions of those who are apparently even more unhappy. Surprisingly, these stories aren’t depressing. There’s very little humor in any of the stories, but Lucky Girls doesn’t dwell on the sadness-it’s just there. Interspersed with the obvious traumas of divorce or abandonment are warm, comfortable moments between fathers and daughters, siblings and even estranged couples. Freudenberger also seems to realize that just one action, event or decision is sometimes enough to permanently damage lives. Readers conditioned to expect the multiple catastrophes that characters, particularly women, must endure in so much of South Asian fiction today may be disappointed.

The title story, originally published in the New Yorker, could be a Bollywood production-a young, foreign woman visiting India with ‘the most glamorous friend” she had made in college stumbles into the wrong bedroom of her hosts’ home and into an older In dian man, twenty-three years older. The reader comes in after Arun has died as the woman deals with her lover’s mother, his wife and his sons, and what comes next in her life. Unlike Bollywood, however, Freudenberger avoids melodrama, even as wife and lover come face to face. A feeling of detachment runs through the story (and most of the others as well), as if their five-year affair happened to someone else.

In The Orphan another rich girl is discovering life (or escaping from it) caring for babies in an AIDS hospice. Starting with a disturbing call to the US in which Mandy announces to her mother she has been raped by her Thai boyfriend, the story shifts focus mid-flight to the parents who fly to Bangkok for a family reunion and to find a way to tell the children they are separated. The rape, which Mandy later describes as ‘misunderstanding’ and ‘a cultural thing,’ is forgotten as the mother adjusts to the change in time zones, the children and her marriage. Listening to this dysfunctional family as they talk past each other is an uncomfortable but not totally unfamiliar experience. Parents and children grow up and apart from each other yet their lives are still inextricably linked, sometimes through relationships barely hanging on by a thread.

Outside the Eastern Gate is the most crowded story of the lot. There’s the free-spirited, manic mother who would rather drive across Afghanistan on an adventure than be a mother or a wife. Taking one daughter with her she abandons another, a 7-year old who remains emotionally paralyzed as an adult, unable to forget how it felt when the car drove off without her, fearful she has inherited her mother’s illness. Another divorce, another lucky girl returning home, this time to face memories buried for 30 years and care for a father with Alzheimer’s. There’s too much going on for Freudenberger to do justice to any one character or storyline but if there is one story that could be spun off for another collection, this is would be my choice.

The Tutor was by far my favorite, though the plot and ending are predictable. Already aware how adept Freudenberger was at placing the reader within each scene, I hadn’t expected her to suddenly put this reader in neighborhoods of her childhood, blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction, as another character in this book observes.

Incredibly, Freudenberger’s descriptions evoked more vivid images than photographs taken during a recent trip back. Setting aside the personal connection and place, this is a simply narrated coming of age story, one for each character, actually, from the father who takes up a job in India after a divorce and Julia, the daughter who just wants to lose her virginity and get into Berkeley, to Zubin, the tutor who has returned to India after earning a graduate degree from Harvard (where he too just wanted to ‘lose it’ to an American woman). Zubin wants to write a book, one that won’t be about what is most familiar to him – Bombay, mangoes or beggars. Thankfully, Freudenberger doesn’t ram these trademark elements of fiction set in India down the reader’s throat either. In Lucky Girls we’re not strangled by swirling silk saris or suffocated by jasmine-scented incense – there’s not even a hint of masala-laced chai. Julia prefers coffee at Barista and sports low-slung jeans and a diamond-studded navel. The mood lifts slightly here, compared to the other stories, and like the others, things aren’t what they seem to be when you dig beneath the surface – they never are.

Dear Sir or Madam: I’m writing to tell you some things you might not want to know about your Writer-in-Residence, Henry Marks.

With this tantalizing opening line in Letter from the Last Bastion, we’re introduced to two people whose paths might not cross outside of a short story collection, the writer (the fictional Marks or young Freudenberger?) and a high-school girl living in Pennsylvania who likes hearing about foreign places. While the technique of narrating the writer’s story (and eventually her own) through a letter works at first, it gets old fast. Or, so I thought until the last paragraphs of the story which provide a sense of closure, just like the end of a letter or a well-written book should.

A reviewer in the Globe and Mail criticizes Nell Freudenberger for writing stories that are not ‘daring or experimental.’ Lucky for us, good fiction doesn’t need to be either.

_{This review was first published on the now-defunct Sawnet (South Asian Women’s NETwork) website.}