Marlena by Julie Buntin: book review
Marlena by Julie Buntin
Overview: Cat is 15 when she moves to Silver Lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There, she meets her next door neighbor, Marlena, who is 17 and undeniably cool. Cat struggles with the move and her parents' divorce, and Marlena offers an escape into a world that's unlike any she's known before as a straight A, strait-laced student. She skips school and is thrown into a world of drugs, drinking, and little supervision. Still, as much as Cat is exposed to, she recognizes that she has a safety net Marlena never had. The book is told in reflection, looking back from a time in her thirties when she'd moved to New York long after Marlena died. Overall: 4
Characters: 4 Cat is an interesting character to tell this story through, and there's an argument that our true main character is Marlena, who has the most dramatic arc of the story. Cat has an undeniable reverence for Marlena as the older cool kid, but her telling is also colored by her adult perspective of understanding that Marlena was in a position where she was never really given a chance with her mom leaving when she was young and her dad cooking meth in their backyard. While Cat falls in with Marlena's group of friends, her mom is vigilant and involved, a benefit the other kids don't have and what always pulls her back on track.
The novel follows the year that Marlena knows Cat before Marlena's death, and the plot beats are really dictated by what happens in Marlena's life because she's the driving force of Cat's life. Not much happens to Cat without the influence of Marlena. Much of the book is spent with Marlena's extended friend group—Ryder, an amateur drug dealer and high school drop out, George, who is fascinated by the budding world of sharing video on the internet, and Tidbit, who is given no personality beyond being George's girlfriend. Cat takes a wide-eyed look at their world and never honestly fits in. Later, Jimmy, Cat's brother, becomes more involved. He toes a line between knowing better than enabling their behavior and also getting caught up in their lawless world.
Plot: 4 The book alternates between telling Marlena's story in Michigan and Cat's story as an adult in New York, which really exists to bookend the main story and show the ways that her time with Marlena continued to effect her. A lot of the New York chapters feel inessential unfortunately. They show how Cat still struggles with alcoholism, though it's unclear if this is a side effect of her time with Marlena or something that she was genetically and environmentally predisposed to because her mother also struggles with drinking through her childhood, or some mix of both. It also shows Cat's heightened empathy because of what she went through with Marlena, but these chapters didn't do much to move the book forward. Really, the only true motivating force here is that the reader is moving closer to figuring out what happens to Marlena, but there's very little drive within the mystery element. I had a hard time getting through the book at points because the "why" was easily lost. I love a slice of life story, and I respect that this is a portrait of an experience—and an important one at that. But it's hard to feel satisfied by a book where the final message is: this happened how it would almost inevitably happen and because of the randomness of life.
Writing: 4 I picked up this novel because a writing class I attended used an excerpt of the opening chapter to talk about maintaining an adult voice in a novel about a teenager. The first few pages took my breath away, and the voice was incredible. The writing is what makes this book worthwhile, which is common for literary fiction. I'm not sure if the brilliance of the prose really managed to sustain the novel when there was so little drive in the plot, but it is certainly compelling. This is a worthwhile portrait, and I might have struggled to get through it just because of the span of time I read it in, but it was a book I lost enthusiasm for over time. It certainly does have the voice of a modern classic, though.
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