Foils and Folly
Rufi Thorpe’s THE GIRLS FROM CORONA DEL MAR
There’s this horrible concept that girls suffer from in which they see themselves and their girlfriends and believe one of them is the leader, the rest are side characters. It’s not an amazingly new concept, and of course, boys do it as well (the classic first-to-mind example I’m thinking of is “The Simpsons” – Bart is the lead, Milhouse is a stupid foil character Bart knows is less important in the entire scheme of life), but really, in most pop culture, boys come in gangs with powers distributed, girls come with Queen Bees and her followers. Seriously – don’t you remember this scene from The Holiday? You’re a leading leader or you’re Judy Greer.
It’s a horrible thing to drill into girls’ psyche, though. As Kate Winslet figures out, YOU’RE supposed to be the leading lady of your own life. If your friends are casting you as the sidekick, making you the Milhouse, there’s a fucking problem with your power dynamics and your self-esteem.
In Rufi Thorpe’s amazing are-you-serious-this-is-a-debut novel The Girls from Corona Del Mar, this struggle between two best friends that grow from girls in mothers and wives to determine which one is the lead sits straight in the center of the drama.
Contender for the lead number one is Mia. She’s an obvious choice for the star, being the first-person narrator of the novel’s 250 or so pages. As girls, Mia plays the more troubled of the pair – between an alcoholic mother, an insensitive father, an abortion at 15 – it seems young life could easily revolve around Mia’s problems and her conquering adversity.
But then there’s contender two, Lolola Lorrie Ann, the kinder, more beautiful girl with what seems a much lighter, bigger heart. Mia’s jealous of the perfection found in Lorrie Ann’s family, the father that writes and sings songs about his daughter, the tightness of the brood and their seeming ability to sustain the best of times together, alone in their home. Even in Mia’s mind, Lorrie Ann is the natural star, Mia herself just a bit player, a foil to show how shitty some other girls’ lives are.
And it’s true – probably more than half of the pages, from girlhood on, revolve around the highs and lows of Lorrie Ann’s life. Of course, it is a life that derails before even graduating high school. Her father, the dad Mia’s infinitely jealous of, dies after an accident with a drunk driver. Just two years after Mia’s abortion, Lorrie Ann’s pregnant, and instead of getting rid of the baby, she decides to keep it and marry the father. Instead of becoming the perfect little starter family, Lorrie Ann’s little boy Zach is born mentally and physically disabled, unable to ever walk or tell his mother he loves her. Even though she could use the help, Lorrie Ann, under direction of her husband, begins to distance herself from Mia, who goes off to Yale.
It’s weird – even after years, Mia still sees herself as the antithesis rather than a protagonist. Lorrie Ann is, in her mind, a modern day Job, a woman who only does good, who only gets shit in return. Through the years, Lorrie Ann’s fortunes worsen and worsen, until she becomes a junkie, a gypsy, a wanderer and a partier moving from fix to fix. Crazy parties, too, most memorably in this paragraph which is by no means the most significant of the novel, but the one I just can’t seem to shake off:
In Hvar, a count, also a multimillionaire, had asked Lorrie Ann to marry him one night and she had even said yes, but then in the morning he didn’t seem to remember it and she didn’t bring it up, in part because a sloth, which had been rented from the zoo for the party, had somehow died during the night and the entire morning was like an extended game of Clue, all of them trying to piece together how the sloth had ended up floating in the pool with the side of its head bashed in. One of the girls, a former Playboy bunny, had had some kind of emotional breakdown over the sloth and did nothing but sit on a deck chair, cradling its wet dead body all morning as she wept into its fur. Finally, it had to be taken from her.
Rufi Thorpe – how do you come up with this stuff?? Who imagines anecdotes about dead sloths and the Playboy bunnies that love them?? Obviously – you can trust her with fiction and telling a wild and worthy story.
In the end, do we ever settle which girl it is/was that is/was the protagonist? Do we learn which girl is the foil?
If you finish this novel and still need an answer to this question, it’s very likely you’ve missed the entire point.
((End note: I feel like I wrote this review and was so focused on how deep and important the storyline is, I forgot to mention: It’s FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC. Even if you aren’t so intrigued by the ranking system of American females, read this because it’s a fan-fucking-tastic book.))
