Carlene Bauer

So far this is the best novel I've read this year (its only late February).

The author Carlene Bauer, uses a real decade long correspondence between Flannery O'Connor and Robert Lowell as her inspiration. While Lowell and O'Connor's relationship never blossomed to romance, this is an imagined conversation, and Bauer's character's are not wholly mappable upon their real counterparts.

This is an epistolary novel. Everything this happens in this novel is relayed by the post--mostly between her show more chief protangonists--Frances and Bernard and their close confidants. Bernard confides in his Harvard friend Ted--an aspiring writer, later turned lawyer. Frances best friend is Claire (yes Francis and Claire).

At the start of the novel, Frances the aspiring novelist and Bernard the poet are both Catholic and start a 'spiritual dialogue.' This blossoms into a deep friendship and romance which spans faith and doubt, darkness, mental illness and betrayal. This novel may not end happy in a pollyanna way, but I think it ends as it should.

More than anything, I found I loved Bauer's prose and found her writing compelling. I cared about these characters and wondered where their imagined conversation would lead. For me, this was a page turner. show less

In a certain sense, "Girls They Write Songs About" is a very new novel, in that it's central protagonists were born after the advent of second-wave feminism and were witnesses to its third wave. They are fully versed in the language of feminist struggle cognizant of how limited their mothers' lives were. They expect to do better, and their smart enough to justify giving it their best shot. It's also no small thing that this novel mentions events and years that I, a still-youngish middle-aged show more person, can actually remember. At one point, somebody takes a picture at Coney Island wearing a red velvet tracksuit. Oh, the nineties.

In another way, it's a very old novel. Jane Austen might have sympathized with Rose and Charlotte. When we meet them, they don't lack for beauty, charm, or ambition, but neither of them own any property or have trust funds, and New York certainly isn't getting any cheaper to live in. As gentrification progresses, it gets more and more expensive to be casually fashionable. These young women face a choice: do they marry a nice-enough man who has made real headway in the world -- or someone who already has enough cash in the bank to rent a private plane -- even if that means changing their bohemian ways and giving up on whatever unwritten books might still be somewhere inside them? How do you weigh a novel you might someday write against a child you might never have? The soundtrack is certainly different -- the Strokes, thank God -- do not rate a mention -- and the world has changed enough that either Rose or Charlotte might conceivably make it as a writer, but this novel takes pains to show that, in some ways, not much has changed for women since the early Victorian period.

I picked up "Girls They Write Songs About" because I was looking for something light, and what could be lighter than a story that revolves around two whip-smart aspiring pop-culture writers in fin-de-siecle New York? But Bauer's tone is careful and introspective throughout, and she spends less time discussing a male "them" than about exploring the inner spaces of Charlotte and Rose's close -- if tense and competitive -- friendship. Like many thinkers seem to be doing these days, "Girls They Write Songs About" questions whether marriage really is the thread that holds a life together. The husbands that both of these women choose seem nice enough, but that is, in itself, part of the problem. During the salad days of their friendship, Rose and Charlotte were more to each other: complements, rivals, sisters, confidants, muses, helpmates. The author depicts their relationship with uncommon skill, which makes it even harder for the reader to see them slowly drift apart. As they say, it's your friends who will break your heart. Recommended. show less

Rose and Charlotte start out as rival writers for a counter-culture magazine, living frantic NYC it-girl lives in 1997, but find their mirror images in each other stomping on men's hearts, drinking too much, and fleeing their middle class childhoods and their destinies to become good suburban wives and mothers. This is such a vivid recounting of their mistakes and their abilities to forgive the other more than themselves, their saving the juiciest parts and most difficult questions for their show more best friend, all the while knowing that although their relationships with their husbands, children, and lovers may last, the golden best friendship will determine most of the decisions and the rules. Women of that era, women of this era, any woman with an exciting and scary life before marriage or career commitment will find this novel to be a pulsating gem.

Quotes: "All those musicians I interviewed went on and on about feeding off the energy of a crowd, and here was that adrenaline rush. The faces loved me, I could tell, and it felt a little like being tempted by Satan, to watch as you coaxed an audience into the palm of your hand, because if you were this good right now, you knew you could get it all the time if you wanted to. And I wanted to, wanted to, wanted to."

"We rolled our eyes at their husbands and the way they overexplained everything to their children as they walked into bodegas and out of the subway, as if they thought being a parent meant being a docent at the museum called Life."

"Rose and I were still on the same team: spies in the house of unexamined privilege."

"It takes real work for a woman to sustain the creation of something outside herself that is not a child. Men don't walk around with a door inside them that they'll constantly have to worry about - should I shut it or keep it open?" show less

Girls They Write Songs About is a tricky novel for me. At times I was heartily engrossed in it, other times I struggled to pick it up. It was a bit like the friendship between the two protagonists, Charlotte and Rose. Sometimes it was full on, sometimes it seemed distant.

The story begins as Charlotte and Rose meet at a music magazine in New York in the 1990s. Rose is the writer, while Charlotte is delegated to edit. It’s not something she wants, as she considers herself a writer. She and show more Rose initially dislike each other, before settling their differences and becoming the very best of friends. Their life is (relatively) carefree and focused on having fun in between writing. But as the years go by, they seem to want – or settle – for different things. For Rose, It’s a ‘safe’ job, husband and family. Charlotte wants to be a free spirit, but she is also somewhat jealous of Rose, which grows stronger as the security in Rose’s life (e.g., housing) becomes more evident. Their friendship grows more distant as Charlotte clings on to the same life that the pair had twenty years ago with awkward results.

The writing is brilliant. Full of thoughts, philosophies on feminism (though some are questionable to me!) and the feelings of being young where anything is possible. There’s a sense of urgency in the first half that there’s not enough time to do, see and feel everything. The pace is tight and there is always something happening. If the second half had some more of this, I feel it would have enthralled me to the end. Perhaps keeping NYC in the picture would have been more successful, as I felt like a major character had disappeared after the setting changed. The strength here is in the characters who are flawed, selfish and driven.

I really enjoyed the first half of this story as Charlotte and Rose tried to take on as much of New York as they possibly could – men, bars, experiences. They were open in their desire to try it all, no matter the consequences. They supported each other through the good and the bad, the highs and lows of career and love. As the story is told in the first person by Charlotte, it’s clear she’s not confident in Rose making the choice to get married, not choosing a family. She responds authentically for her character, in affairs with married men (one of which leads to a divorce) as well as destroying her own marriage. (It’s questionable whether the marriage was just to ‘keep up’ with Rose – after all, the pair were rivals before they were friends). As Charlotte and Rose drift apart, I found Charlotte’s character more annoying. She’s more rigid in her thoughts of the ‘right’ way to live a life, even though she is nowhere near innocent herself. She’s going off the rails from what her young self wanted, and she doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to fix it even though she does seem to recognise that it’s occurring. She seemed to lose her drive and become quite weary and static. It was difficult to enjoy this part of the story as it really seemed to go in circles. There is a glimmer of hope that a younger character, Elinor, can have all that Rose and Charlotte dreamed of, but it’s distant.

Thank you to Bloomsbury for the copy of this book. My review is honest.

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