Sometimes it seems as though every girl had an impossibly beautiful best friend in high school. Maybe thats just a function of the almost prescribed insecurity young women face as teens. Our tummies are too soft, our knees too knobbly, our hair too flat and our skin congested. Someone else is always more perfect, and that someone else can become an fixation. Basically, teenagers are shallow. The narrator of Marlena, a woman named Cat, realizes that, looking back. Shes telling the story of her high school best friend from the vantage point of a grown-up, someone whos graduated, gotten out and made a new life. Shes aware that her own teenage self cared about the wrong things. Marlena, she recalls, was alarmingly pretty ' sly, feline face, all cheekbone and blink ' and if I am honest, that was the first reason I wanted to become friends. She catalogues her own physical flaws, then adds, Still, I believed that at any second I might become beautiful. I was crazy about girls who already were.Marlenas beauty, it turns out, also serves as misdirection; Cat never really notices how much trouble her buddy is in ' only how effortless, how glamorous, how sharply cheekboned she is. Cat has just moved to a dying town in Michigan with her mother, recently divorced, and her older brother, Jimmy, when she meets Marlena. The newly depleted family, struggling financially without Cats father, moved to find a cheaper life, but she is resentful about leaving her prep school and friends. In Silver Lake, Cat discovers, they have neighbors ' most notably Marlena, who is two years older than Cat, and Sal, Marlenas little brother. Their mother is gone and their father more of a burden than a parent, so Marlena cares for him. Compared to Cats navet, Marlena appears all grown up.She wears T-shirts with the necks cut out. She has a cute boyfriend. She gets Cat to cut class and smoke pot and drink with her all day.For the awkward, nerdy girl Cat sees herself as being, a best friendship with an older girl like Marlena ' sharp, sarcastic, creative and gorgeous ' offers almost inconceivable excitement. Immediately, she remembers, there were signs that something wasnt right, signs everywhere that she almost couldnt have missed, except that she did. Marlena acts erratic, drinks too much, constantly skips school; her deadbeat father spends most of his time in a janky shed nearby, which Cat doesnt realize at the time is a meth lab. Its not a spoiler to say that Marlena has died by the end of the novel. The novel reveals that almost immediately. But working up to how, or at least why, she wound up lying dead in a few inches of icy slush in the woods, is a more harrowing journey. Shes mixed up in an exploitative relationship with an older man. Sal is taken away from the family home after a visit from CPS, and Marlena struggles to win custody of him. She seems to physically deteriorate. Cat sees her as larger than life through all of this, untouchable; all she really sees in Marlena is someone she wants to be. As she goes over and over her indelible memories of the months she spent attached to her friends hip, she tries to pin down the moments when all was lost. When did her drug habits get too extreme' When did she lose hope of making it out' Marlena is a confessional work, a narrators exhausted, fruitless self-excoriation. Like many women looking back on her teen years, Cat recalls not appreciating her mother enough, not noticing the shit going on in her friends lives, not looking outside herself. Beyond the exhilarating and terrifying evolution of the girls friendship, Buntin excels at capturing the sensations of girlhood. Cat tries booze, and drugs. She runs through the woods barefoot and comes back with feet embedded with grit. She feels vague sexual stirrings that she cant cope with, though she tries. She masturbates unsuccessfully in bed, remembering later how sweat broke out along my upper lip and around my temples. I threw the covers off my body and pushed my pants partway down, still rubbing myself over my underwear [...] I pressed into myself harder, but the urgency ebbed and the feeling turned back into a tingle. I removed my hand and covered my eyes with my palms. My fingers smelled. I pinched the skin on my upper arm, tugging it away from the bone. Flabby. Flabby and gross.At every turn, Buntins prose flows with the easy, confident rhythms of an accomplished writer, and though theres really no mystery in the narrative, it reads nearly as compulsively as a thriller. As authors of whats been morbidly dubbed sick lit know, the shocking, inexplicable juxtaposition of youths limitless potential and a central figures looming death imbues every moment with tension.The tale of two friends, one who succeeds and one who fails, isnt new ' its the entire focus of Elena Ferrantes wildly popular Neapolitan books. But it remains fascinating nonetheless, especially in Buntins capable hands. Its an inescapable fact that the tightest of bonds cant paper over gulfs that open up between people as time passes; circumstances change, and life tears at our friendships. In the case of Marlena, the breach is more abrupt, more total. Cats realization that there are other forces in the world more powerful than her oaths of friendship is a coming-of-age,but also emotionally stunting. The trauma keeps her suspended in the past, hoping one day to understand it.The Bottom Line:Marlenas vivid portrait of a friendship between two teenage girls in a troubled community ' one who made out, and one who didnt ' viscerally captures the sensations and heartaches of adolescence.What other reviewers think:PW: In her impressive debut novel, Buntin displays a remarkable control of tone and narrative arc.Kirkus: Sensitive and smart and arrestingly beautiful, debut novelist Buntins tale of the friendship between two girls in the woods of Northern Michigan makes coming-of-age stories feel both urgent and new.Who wrote it'Marlena is Julie Buntins debut novel. She is the director of writing programs at Catapult, and she has been published in The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, Slate, and more.Who will read it'Readers who love realistic novels about female friendship, such as fans of the Neapolitan novels.Opening lines:Tell me what you cant forget, and Ill tell you who you are. I switch off my apartment light and she comes with the dark. The trains eye widens in the tunnel and there she is on the tracks, blond hair swinging. One of our old songs starts playing and I lose myself right in the middle of the cereal aisle. Sometimes, late at night, when Im fumbling with the key outside my apartment door, my eyes meet my reflection in the hallway mirror and I see her, waiting.Notable passage:So, very quickly, as you can see, in no more than a matter of weeks, she was my best friend. I was the first person, she told me, whose brain moved as quickly as hers, who got the weird things she said, her jokes, her vile, made-up swears, and could sharpen them with my own. A best friend is a magic thing, like finding a stump full of water that will make you live forever, or wandering into a field overrun by unicorns, or standing in a wardrobe one minute and a snowy forest the next.MarlenaBy Julie BuntinHenry Holt, $26.00Published April 4, 2017 The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related... + articlesList=58e2bf22e4b03a26a36545da,58b744bfe4b019d36d1074e2,58b483eee4b060480e0adfac,58a78e0ae4b045cd34c1da7e,5898dde2e4b09bd304bcf195,58948f74e4b0406131364c52,588675b5e4b070d8cad4c8e7,587f97dde4b0cf0ae8811f04,586ffef4e4b043ad97e368be,586aeaefe4b0eb58648a3ccf -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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