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Notes -
More than halfway through Eliza Clark's Penance. In some ways it's a frustrating book to read. When Clark is describing the social dynamics of teenaged girls in secondary school (the sniping, the passive-aggression, the jokes that aren't really jokes, the abandoning of one friend as soon as a better one comes along), she's in her element, and I can't put it down. It doesn't just feel "true to life": it makes me literally feel like I'm back in secondary school, and I feel like I went to school with these girls. The period detail is also spot on, with pitch-perfect descriptions of pink clamshell Motorolas, or sneaking bottles of blue WKD into a house party. Anyone who was a teenager in Ireland or the UK from 2005-15 would read this and feel a shock of recognition.
It's everything else that doesn't work. I imagine Clark was worried about getting pegged as a YA novelist (even though this novel, despite its primarily adolescent cast of characters, is not suitable for teenagers), so she pads out the novel with digressions about the main characters' parents, the backstory of the town itself, the socio-political context in which the murder occurred. In these chapters, Clark sounds hesitant and unsure of herself, and rightfully so. While the chapters written from the girls' perspectives are confident enough not to lead the reader by the hand, these other chapters are anything but: far more telling than showing, lots of underlining for emphasis. Worst of all, they compromise the novel's verisimilitude: while the teenaged girls feel like people I've personally met, their parents are two-dimensional at best. The worst offender in this regard is the father of one of the guilty girls, a stock caricature of a Telegraph-reading, UKIP-voting blowhard with delusions of grandeur, who immediately rushes to the defense of a friend of his (a thinly-veiled stand-in for Jimmy Savile) when he's accused of pederasty.
I predict that when I finish the novel (which I fully intend to), I'll come away thinking it could have lost a hundred pages without compromising any of its themes or effect. Clark would have been wise to stay within her comfort zone for the sophomore effort.
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