Pretty Little Dirty
Issue #26
by Amanda Boyden
By Ling Ma
Published: December 1st, 2005 | 3:53pm
It’s a story you’ve heard before. There are two childhood best friends — one brash and gutsy, the other more timid and observant — who come of age together through adolescence and into their twentysomethings. Lisa Michelle Smith (the timid one) and Celeste Rose Diamond (the brash one) share rebellious rites of passage. They spend summers trying to befriend the cool arty kids at the Nelson Atkins Museum in their hometown, Kansas City. They embark on increasingly brazen sexual escapades, first with fellow summer campers, then with older artists. They miss curfew after curfew.
By now, the common coming-of-age novel is as old as the fountain-of-youth myth. It is, by nature, predictable. What sustains the genre is the vital youthfulness of the voice that drives it, complete with its posturings and follies. Remember the sharp and salty Viva Cohen in Emma Forrest’s Namedropper? Remember the broodingly nostalgic Art Bechstein in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh? Trudging through the garden-variety flora and fauna of Boyden’s over-embellished prose, I don’t think I will remember Pretty Little Dirty other than its half-hearted attempt to imbibe from that same fountain of youth.
While Lisa and Celeste physically develop into more mature figures — a process descriptively chronicled with the usual analogies between female anatomical parts and ripened fruit — Boyden never convincingly develops the characters themselves as identifiable personalities. Celeste, the dominant object of Lisa’s girlhood infatuation and the core of the story, may be the wilder of the two, but, with so little psychological insight, she remains uncompelling and quite generic.
There are some buoyant passages of exhilaration and wild images of hallucinogenic energy here — nightly jailbait trysts with older men in sculpture gardens, a polyester-flying catfight at a New Year’s Eve party — but these are ultimately lost in a dense bramble of filler descriptions, reactionary scenarios, and trendy expletive phrases. To which all I can say is, “Geez, Louise.”
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Pretty Little Dirty (Vintage)
by Amanda Boyden
384 pages
List Price: $13.95
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