Foxfire : en tjejligas bekännelser (original 1993; edition 1995)

The main character's name is Legs. There are other characters with equally appealing names like Maddy Monkey, Boom Boom, & Fireball. This is the story of an adventure of a girl gang in the 1950s. It is a fun read. Skip the bad 90s flick and read the book. You won't be sorry. ( )

There's a lot about "Foxfire" that'll be pretty familiar to Joyce Carol Oates fans. It's set in upstate New York in the fifties, and it explores the social and personal tensions that simmered under that decade's sunny surface. Oates's prose, which is sometimes too careful and fussily crafted for my taste, is freer and more sensual here, capturing both the wildness of her protagonists' youth and the sexual tensions they seem to feel but can't articulate. "Foxfire" will doubtlessly seem sort of quaint to some readers: it features greasers and big cars and gang activity that, while shocking enough in context, isn't half as frightening as what would follow two or three decades later. Still, even as she writes from the vantage point of the mid-nineties, Oates skilfully keeps "Foxfire" from devolving into period kitsch. Her characters, who don't hesitate to share their rawest emotions with each other, feel genuinely scared and adrift, and Oates emphasizes the tenuousness of their survival and the difficulty of the choices they face. A lot of political parallels can probably be drawn to what might be described as an experiment in all-female communal living and social revolution, and Oates's portrayal of their troubled lives does, in a sense, have a more pointedly political edge than I would have expected from her. To analyze it from a political standpoint with the benefit of hindsight would miss, I think, what "Foxfire" accomplishes. A frame tale co-written by one of the gang's former members, it is, like many of Joyce Carol Oates's novels, a wonderful example of how even fictional narratives can make too-familiar history seem vital and alive. The author, to her credit, writes like someone who considers the preservation of her characters' memories to be her highest calling. Recommended. ( )

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Excellent illustration of why a gang is formed and how it stays together. Long, long sentences. ( )