Broke-ass city chicks, London 1945 edition

[bloodygranuaile]

Today in "books I was supposed to read for a book club but I didn't make it to book club," I just finished The Girls of Slender Means, by Muriel Sparks.

The first thing I noticed about this book is that it is pretty short, coming in at 175 pages. A lot of 20th-century lit is pretty short, I think, though I'm not sure why. There is probably research on it somewhere.

The last book I read was also short mid-20th-century women's literature, though a very different genre, but it was still interesting to see what struck me as stylistic similarities, although I guess it is just general mid-century writing that I'm responding to. There are few other similarities. Jackson was American and Sparks was British. Jackson wrote creepy gothic/horror and Spark's book is sort of everyday realism/slice of life, with a slightly comic touch.

The story takes place in 1945, in a boardinghouse in London called the May of Teck Club, for the titular impoverished-but-not-destitute women under thirty. The book has a very strong sense of time and place, with the war and rationing and all that sort of thing shaping everyone's everyday lives to a large degree; at the same time, much of it was very familiar to me as a broke young lady under thirty myself, and one who has lived in shared housing for the past ten years. Some of it is embarrassingly similar to things I see today in detail, such as the party with a bunch of hip young intellectuals drinking beer out of jam jars even though there's no shortage of real cups, and other bits are more painfully familiar in essence even if the details are different, like how freaking irritatingly faux-deep all the oversexed poetic young intellectual dudes are, and the poor young lady who works in publishing staying up late in her room doing freelance work to make ends meet while trying to emotionally subsist off of the vague air of glamour she gets from her peers for working in the "world of books." Shit never changes, does it.

The vignettes about the May of Teck's inhabitants are threaded together with a framing device that is a series of phone calls between the various girls, several years later, passing around the news that the central insufferable young intellectual dude of 1945 has just died in an uprising in Haiti, where he had gone as a missionary. The girl who worked in publishing has grown up to be a gossip columnist, so she is the one mostly trying to spread the news and collect information for an article.

The girls who are featured most often in the vignettes are Jane, the one who works for a shady publisher; Selina, a very beautiful girl with multiple lovers, including the intellectual dude, who she meets by climbing out the bathroom window to sleep with on the roof; and Joanna, who teaches elocution, apparently during every waking minute. There are another half-dozen or so girls who we know by name and with varying degrees of characterization, but Jane, Selina, and Joanna are the most important. At first it seems as if the book doesn't have too much in the way of plot, being mostly a series of darkly witty observations about the follies of young minds that take themselves very seriously, but it does all lead up to a rather explosive ending.

I should probably check out some of Muriel Sparks' other writing; it seems like the sort of thing I really ought to have read in college but didn't. It also makes me want beer in a jam jar, but if I went and poured myself one I'd probably just feel pretentious.