Author: Nell Freudenberger
Publisher:

Young American writer Nell Freudenberger created a buzz several years ago when her short story “ Lucky Girls” earned her a $500,000 offer for a book that hadn’t even been written yet. Freudenberger did end up writing that book, the debut collection of short stories called Lucky Girls, and although she doesn’t quite live up to the hype (who really could?) she doesn’t disappoint either. Lucky Girls is an excellent read, thoroughly absorbing and beautifully observed, one that any modern writer would be proud to call her own.

The collection of five long short stories revolves around five women and their journeys to southeast Asia and India. These women, ranging in age from thirteen to somewhere in the mid to late forties, are American women of some wealth and privilege – ‘lucky girls’ as Freudenberger calls them. Some are born or raised in the east, others travel there. One doesn’t even go there but is introduced to Vietnam through a friend’s correspondence. Their other commonality is a sense of dissatisfaction with their lives, a disaffection That cannot be conquered by their Material wealth.

Freudenberger opens with “Lucky Girls”, a story that was published first in the new Yorker. Its unnamed narrator is a woman in her twenties who travels to India and conducts an affair with unmarried Indian man. After his death, She stays on in India, attached by memory if not blood to that country. She must stake her territory go against his mother and why does she does with admirable stubbornness, winning the grudging respect of Mrs. Chawla the senior, while reiterating her right to status as a woman not bound to a man in any recognizable way.

“The Orphan” chronicles a few days in the life of an American woman who goes to Bangkok with her husband to tell her grown children about their impending divorce. Faced with overwhelming culture shock – her daughter may or may not have been raped by her Thai boyfriend — she retreats into the familiarity and safety of her conjugal bed even though it is crumbling beneath her.

In “The Tutor” Julia, an American teenager in New Delhi, plans to lose her virginity to her Indian SAT tutor, a recent Harvard graduate who is has lost as she is, Despite the longing in every possible way to his country and Culture. These three stories—“Lucky Girls”, “The Orphan”, and “The Tutor” – are the strongest and most realistic of the five, With sympathetic protagonists, believable dilemmas, and authentic non-resolutions which echo reality rather than the seductive easy endings of fiction.

But sometimes Freudenberger takes ambivalence too far. “Outside the Eastern Gate”, which details the impact of maternal abandonment on a small American girl in New Delhi, and “Letter from the Last Bastion”, a story about a writer and his teenaged penpal, are confusing and vague, although Freudenberger was attempting a dream-life tone clouded by the haze of memory. Her technique of switching narrators – between the thirteen year old and the older writer in “Last Bastion” and between the daughter, the mother, the father, and the best friend in “Eastern Gate” – is too ambitious and cumbersome to maintain effectively throughout these stories. Freudenberger’s astute eye for details results in some heavy-handed prose, as well, with paragraphs of description that weigh down the writing in a way that most writers suffer through in their first attempts.

Still, Freudenberger’s strengths are apparent: an ease with language, the eye of a writer and photographer all at once, able to capture images, sensations, and thought in lyrical, elegiac prose. She also commands a remarkable ability to write about the East, making it look normal yet different, without spices, veils, dark-skinned beauties and all the other baggage of orientalism that plagues most books on India and the Far East. Freudenberger controls her short stories with a skill reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies. Most of all, Freudenberger has created five short stories that are incredibly readable, to be savored and enjoyed slowly rather than rushed through hurriedly. Freudenberger is a writer with a great deal of talent and a road of stories stretching out before her. Let’s hope she lives up to her potential.