Nell Freudenberger
Lucky Girls
'Travelling is for people who don't know how to be happy,' observes a character in the second story of Nell Freudenberger's collection. It's a neat aphorism, but also a knowing reference to the sense of cultural and personal dislocation that permeates these stories.
Each tale depicts a young american woman living in, revisiting or imagining a foreign world – mostly that of a vibrant but remote Southeast Asia: India, Thailand, VIetnam. The protagonists share that peculiar mix of cultural naivety and social audacity – the pupil in mumbai, desperate to achieve the right SAT scores so she can go to Berkeley but who 'won't eat Indian food', or the well-meaning volunteer in Bangkok who works with 'the Aids babies' and strikes up unnecessary conversations in order to show off her fluent Thai. There is a wry and often humorous delicacy to Freudenberger's observations, a deftness in the way she handles her displaced characters and their confused relationships with the countries they inhabit.
But the true warmth of these stories emerges through the subtlety of her characters and their intense, strained relationships with family, lovers and friends. This is where Freudenberger finds her stride – in the awkward, disjointed conversations between children and parents in The Orphan, or the passionate intimacy and poignancy of a remembered lover in the title story Lucky Girls. the dialogue is beautifully pitched, the perception of the minutiae of human interaction and misunderstanding, at times, astonishing.
Surprisingly for a collection of short stories, though, there is little variation in voice. Given their shared preoccupations of foreignness and home, memory and loss, the stories naturally inform each other. But they begin to lack definition and individuality, becoming variations on a theme rather than worlds unto themselves. This is not helped by the crafted evenness and constancy of freudenberger's tone, which starts to stifle.
The exception can be found in the final story. Letter From The Last Bastion demonstrates a dramatic and welcome departure from the previous conventional narratives. The story consists of a letter from a teenage girl called 'Miss Fish' to a university professor that outlines her relationship with Henry Marks, a celebrated writer. It is a complex, fascinating piece of writing: we learn Henry's story through her interpretations of his letters to her, interspersed with passages from his novels which depict the same events – chiefly, his time in vietnam during the war, and his subsequent return to the us and to his lover, Laura.
The sense of dislocation here is not that of the individual in an alien culture. Instead it resides in an exploration of the art and deception of storytelling. Laura, the long-suffering lover, encapsulates this idea as she remarks icily to Henry: 'it's this supernatural impression you have of yourself. You're not a ghost. You're just a writer.' Freudenberger confronts and contorts the essence of writing, its inspiration, influence and potential to destroy, and ultimately its precarious relationship with truth. It's a tantalising tale and one that would thrive from expansion – you feel it pushing at the formulaic boundaries of the short story. It is this ambitious and adventurous final piece that lifts Freudenberger's collection, and confirms her much-hyped ability and promise.
Each tale depicts a young american woman living in, revisiting or imagining a foreign world – mostly that of a vibrant but remote Southeast Asia: India, Thailand, VIetnam. The protagonists share that peculiar mix of cultural naivety and social audacity – the pupil in mumbai, desperate to achieve the right SAT scores so she can go to Berkeley but who 'won't eat Indian food', or the well-meaning volunteer in Bangkok who works with 'the Aids babies' and strikes up unnecessary conversations in order to show off her fluent Thai. There is a wry and often humorous delicacy to Freudenberger's observations, a deftness in the way she handles her displaced characters and their confused relationships with the countries they inhabit.
But the true warmth of these stories emerges through the subtlety of her characters and their intense, strained relationships with family, lovers and friends. This is where Freudenberger finds her stride – in the awkward, disjointed conversations between children and parents in The Orphan, or the passionate intimacy and poignancy of a remembered lover in the title story Lucky Girls. the dialogue is beautifully pitched, the perception of the minutiae of human interaction and misunderstanding, at times, astonishing.
Surprisingly for a collection of short stories, though, there is little variation in voice. Given their shared preoccupations of foreignness and home, memory and loss, the stories naturally inform each other. But they begin to lack definition and individuality, becoming variations on a theme rather than worlds unto themselves. This is not helped by the crafted evenness and constancy of freudenberger's tone, which starts to stifle.
The exception can be found in the final story. Letter From The Last Bastion demonstrates a dramatic and welcome departure from the previous conventional narratives. The story consists of a letter from a teenage girl called 'Miss Fish' to a university professor that outlines her relationship with Henry Marks, a celebrated writer. It is a complex, fascinating piece of writing: we learn Henry's story through her interpretations of his letters to her, interspersed with passages from his novels which depict the same events – chiefly, his time in vietnam during the war, and his subsequent return to the us and to his lover, Laura.
The sense of dislocation here is not that of the individual in an alien culture. Instead it resides in an exploration of the art and deception of storytelling. Laura, the long-suffering lover, encapsulates this idea as she remarks icily to Henry: 'it's this supernatural impression you have of yourself. You're not a ghost. You're just a writer.' Freudenberger confronts and contorts the essence of writing, its inspiration, influence and potential to destroy, and ultimately its precarious relationship with truth. It's a tantalising tale and one that would thrive from expansion – you feel it pushing at the formulaic boundaries of the short story. It is this ambitious and adventurous final piece that lifts Freudenberger's collection, and confirms her much-hyped ability and promise.
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