THE GIRLS by Emma Cline

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT

I just finished this book. I don't know if I quite fit the intended audience. I am a middle aged man with an interest in the strange events of the hippie era in which I was a very small child, while I think this book is marketed at young women between 15 and 25 who are fans of Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey but perhaps want something more serious.

While many have praised Cline for her writing, I found her style really overdone. Phrases like "...my brain resting in watery space, as untroubled as a goldfish in a glass bowl." and "her soft jaw and damp eyes. Small teeth, straight and slightly pointed, like a strange and beautiful cat." are found on every page. She's just trying way too hard here. It's like the work of a creative writing student who has been told she needs to use more similes and metaphors. While I am sure it takes a lot of hard work to write this way, I found it distracting and the written equivalent of ham-acting.

There's so much detail about clothing, make-up, hair, food etc. I realize it's supposed to be the story of a teenage girl and those are important issues for that demographic, but that type of content is not what I want from a book about the Manson Family. Talking about that is a waste of time at the expense of other important issues native to the subject matter. The mood of the 60s is not really effectively managed, either. She seems to be using a modern Hipster's point of reference to the decade, with characters listening to music by Hipster retro-faves like Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Berkin, and eating modern Hipster trendy foods like miso. Sure, I was only a toddler when the 60s ended, but her picture of the decade felt fake and filtered through the lens of a modern retro Hipster.

Also, using a minor member of the Family as a protagonist seems like such a wasted opportunity. Her Evie is on the outside fringe of all the events, and spends much of the novel away from the goings-on at the Ranch. She's not present at the murders, nor is she there during the weirdest periods of paranoia, conflict and stress at the Ranch. She never even goes out in the desert with the Family. A story told from the POV of the Susan Atkins or the Patricia Krenwinkle character would have been so much more engrossing. If you are going to tell a story set against these events, why bother to tell it from the perspective of a virtual outsider? It's a tragically wasted opportunity. This betrays a lack of self-confidence in the author's own story-telling skills. This story could have been set against any event. The Manson angle was not necessary for the account of a materially spoiled, emotionally neglected teenager griping about her life and family and the shabby way males treat her.

This brings me to the general man-hating tone of this book. I haven't read much feminist literature before, but the amount of hatred for males in this book is astonishing. Every male in the book except the 5 year old victim and the groundskeeper victim is shown to be a sex-obsessed, shallow violent user, abuser and loser. Even the infant boy, Nico, is a monster. Horrible, violent selfish, evil men are the norm in Cline's world. If a man had written a book with this much hatred for women in it I doubt it ever would have gotten published, and if by some miracle it did, it would have faced a firestorm of opposition. Cline even justifies the killings by Suzanne and the other women as a natural reaction to their repression by males.

The book did keep me reading, mainly to see if the storytelling would improve. Cline does have talent, but really needs to limit her creative use of simile and metaphor to perhaps one or two per chapter, as well as tone down the man-hating and improve her 60s references.

Another major gripe I had is that Cline has her version of the Manson Family murder members of the household of her version of Dennis Wilson, with whom the Family had close recent ties, rather than the unrelated Tate-Polanski household. If Manson had indeed had attacked Wilson's home, with the depth of his connections and the well-known threats Manson had made, the case would have been closed within hours, rather than the months it takes in the book. Cline explains this off-handedly by saying the Wilson character had so many enemies, that the police never bothered to check out the Family. Major cop-out literary license is taken here.

I know it's not fair to assume things about an author by the fiction they create, but Cline also seems to have a major lesbian crush on Susan Atkins, as much of the narrative hinges on the lesbian crush Evie has on the Susan Atkins stand-in, Suzanne. Evie feels like a "Mary-Sue" stand in for the author most of the time. It kind of reads like Susan Atkins internet fan-fiction at times. I also found it odd that Evie, with such strong lesbian tendencies in the 60s segments, seems to have lived a completely heterosexual life since then, when we see her as a 50 something woman in the modern segments of the novel.

Character equivalents:

Suzanne - Susan Atkins
Donna - Squeaky Fromme/Sandra Goode amalgam.
Helen - Diane "Snake" Lake/Linda Kasabian amalgam.
Roos - Patricia Krenwinkle/Mary Brunner amalgam.
Russel - Charles Manson
Mitch Lewis - Dennis Wilson
Guy - Bobby Beausoleil/Tex Watson amalgam.
Nico - Valentine Michael "Pooh Bear" Manson

The characters in the book don't necessarily take part in all the same actions that their real life counterparts did, but I do feel the above list represents who Cline had in mind when writing them.

I would give it a 2 1/2 star out of 5 rating. I was looking for a fictionalized treatment of the Manson story, having read several non-fiction accounts, but this one was just a slight glimpse of that weird world. I would have liked less suburban angst and more crazy freakiness in this book. I did not get what I was hoping for when I picked it up.