The exquisitely artful fiction debut of Vanity Fair columnist Elissa Schappell is a novel told in ten stories that resonate with the most profound experiences in the life of a young woman - friendship and rivalry, the love for a man, the birth of a child, and the death of a father.
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Schappell has a gift for alert first-person narrative, sardonic humor, nuanced sex scenes, child characters as lifelike as (and less sentimental than) Salinger's, and tense conversations that quiver like crossed fencing foils. The book is rife with piercing insights and illuminating turns of phrase. Peering into a loved one's urn, the orally oriented Evie observes that "the bits of burned white bone look like miniature marshmallows in pale cocoa." Her stressed-out mom "looks as breakable as a dime-store comb." A 16-year-old Catholic schoolgirl awaiting her third abortion notices the clinic's "bus-station furniture designed to cause discomfort," the "disco effect" of a flickering fluorescent tube overhead, and inside the light, the "dead flies, all on their backs, legs up and crossed."
The schoolgirl is Evie's best friend, Mary Beth, who narrates Schappell's second-best story, "Novice Bitch," which concerns Mary Beth's post-abortion bonding experience with her mom at a traumatizing dog show. It's poignant and painful--Schappell's favorite emotional cocktail. Mary Beth also comes alive in "The Garden of Eden," which evokes the girls' boho idyll in Amsterdam. But for most of the book, she is sketchy, and little exists beyond the struggles of Evie, her doting and imperiled father, and her lovingly troublesome mother. Evie's husband, sister, and the odd lover are fine as far as they go, which isn't far. There's supposed to be an ongoing subtext about Mary Beth's rivalry for Evie's dad's affections--Mary Beth's father is emotionally AWOL with increasingly younger wives--but Schappell doesn't pull it off. She's better at contrasting the girls' erotic strategies: Mary Beth goes for it, while "Evie thinks it perfectly acceptable to get completely naked with a man and then say, 'Oh, let's just kiss.'"
Two things in Use Me stick with you: the deadly accuracy of the family grief scenes and the enchanted account of Evie's (and Mary Beth's) adolescence. Despite a few flaws, this is an electrifying debut. Elissa Schappell is the genuine article. --Tim Appelo
Elissa Schappell writes the "Hot Type" cohmm for Vanity Fair and is a founding editor of the new literary magazine Tin House. She received her MFA from the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She has been a senior editor at The Paris Review and has contributed to numerous magazines, including GQ, Vogue, Bomb, Bookforum, and Spin. She lives in Brooklyn.
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