The Burning Girl by Claire Messud Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“My mother assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later, for reasons more or less identifiable; everyone loses a best friend at some point. Not in the “she moved to Tucson” sense, but in the sense that we grew apart.”- The Burning Girl, Claire Messud 

A bracing, hypnotic coming-of-age story about the bond of best friends, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor’s Children.

Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship.

Claire Messud, one of our finest novelists, is as accomplished at weaving a compelling fictional world as she is at asking the big questions: To what extent can we know ourselves and others? What are the stories we create to comprehend our lives and relationships? Brilliantly mixing fable and coming-of-age tale, The Burning Girl gets to the heart of these matters in an absolutely irresistible way. 

One of the contemporary novelist's best loved stories is one of the death of a friendship, especially if it happens to be about two girls. I suppose because that way you can explore two very different personalities and how they work against each other and the "psychology of growing up" and all that fun literary fiction nonsense that Man Booker short lists are made of. But something that I realized while reading Claire Messud's The Burning Girl is that there's not much new that really can be said about the topic. These many growing apart stories all basically hold the same coming of age message, the same message that mothers have been telling children since the dawn of time- you aren't always going to be best friends with the same person you were best friends with in elementary school. I've been told that as a child, and I bet you have been too.

And not only that, everyone's also got a best friendship falling apart due to the very different paths they took story, me included. And usually, the stories are pretty similar, and sadly, usually involve one party turning out better than the other. In that respect, The Burning Girl reminded me strongly of my own friendship with a girl, let's call her C, who never really had a stable home life or a future the way I was lucky enough to have. And, like Julia's mom, I'm sure my mother was happy enough when that friendship died without any drama, but it still hurt that someone who was once my best friend- not only that, someone whose house I was at basically every weekend for a year when I was in fourth grade- went on such a drastically different life path. So in that respect The Burning Girl was quite realistic with the way Julia and Cassie's relationship went on a slow decline in middle school.

The Burning Girl feels like it would say something new and different about the old friendship dying story mostly due to how artfully it's written. And it is really written quite beautifully with several scenes calling to mind my own childhood in New England and running around in the woods surrounding my house, wading in rivers or building forts out of old trees. But as the book progressed, it seemed like Messud's writing was mostly to distract from the fact that this story had been told a million times before, and that this book added nothing more to that particularly tropish story. 

Another thing that was supposed to set this apart from other stories along the same lines as this is that, despite the teenage characters, this is an adult book that just happens to have a teenaged main character. It was written like an adult looking back on her adolescence, something along the same lines as Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves and it would have worked better like that. Two years just doesn't strike me as enough time to get retrospective about childhood friendships. 

I think the fact that this is an adult novel both works in its favor and doesn't. Because, on one hand the book is separated from the teenage crowd and given an audience that may be more receptive to this kind of humdrum story. But on the other hand, it would shine in the YA genre, blowing other books about the same thing like Suicide Notes From Beautiful Girls or Lessons From a Dead Girl out of the water. I wasn't too impressed by it as an adult novel but if I had encountered it in the YA section of my local library I might have been more receptive to it.

I think a lot could have been done better or made more clearly, as much of the ambiguity is clearly done just for the sake of literary merit. Like Cassie's family and Julia's too. No questions were answered at the end and I was left feeling unsatisfied, and it made the ending have the same contrived problem History of Wolves had. 

I was also a bit annoyed by some small continuity problems, something that can only really slide by in a book longer than 400 pages. Like the fact that at one point Cassie is described as having an aptitude for math only later to be described as being in remedial math, and at another point Julia is said to be in advanced math but later on said to be no good at the subject. Little things like that bug me.

In the end, The Burning Girl is basically just another literary fiction novel without much new or interesting to say. I couldn't bring myself to care much about it and it's probably one of the more forgettable 2017 literary releases anyway. It's a three star book, and just scrolling through Goodreads, I can see most people are with me on that. 

6 out of 10

If you liked this book, you may also like: 

Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls by Lynn Weingarten

The History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund