At my book group last month, we talked about novels about friendship – how surprisingly few of them there are. It’s something Rachel and I often mention on ‘Tea or Books?’. While there are many, many children’s books where friends are front and centre, it’s an area that novels for adults have curiously overlooked. And yet, for many people, they are just as important as romantic relationships – and likely to last longer.
But I have read two books in recent weeks that are about the intensity, highs and lows of friendship between two women.
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994) has a dreadful title but a very good novella about the friendship between Berie (the narrator) and Sils – starting as children, and both deepening and splintering as they head towards the cusp of adulthood.
The girls work together at Storyland – a sort of theme park, where local teenagers dress up as storybook characters, and younger local and visiting children go on the kind of lacklustre fairground attraction that is only a draw in a small town. The crux of the shift in Berie and Sils’ friendship is the different rate at which they mature. Sils is clearly readier for adult life, or at least believes she is. She is more attractive to men, more confident in her sexuality, more willing to explore a new stage in life. We see all this from Berie’s perspective – which is, in fact, the adult, married Berie looking back on her adolescence. The layers of knowledge and regret cover over the naivety and confusion that teenage Berie felt, and the whirlwind experience that knowing Sils was.
“How yew girls doin’?” was inevitably how it began, and then usually the guy fussed with the front lock of Sils’s hair, pulling it out of her eyes, or he sat next to her, hip to hip, or he asked what she was drinking or did she want to dance to this song, it was a good song for dancing, it was a good night for dancing, didn’t she think so?
Usually it was a humid night, the boards of the place dank as a river dock. Sometimes I protected her with gruffness or a smirk or a cryptic look to make the guy think we were making fun of him. That he was too old. “It’s only teenage wasteland,” wailed the jukebox during the band’s breaks. I would nudge her.
But sometimes I got up and went to the bathroom, let her deal with him, and sometimes later he would give us a ride home at eleven-thirty, hoping for her, dreaming, waiting for us at the corner while we went to one or the other of our houses, said good night to our mothers, went to our room, stuffed pillows under the covers, making curved and lumpy bodies, then climbed out the window.
I’d only previously read some of Moore’s short stories, which I didn’t love, so I wasn’t prepared for the brilliance of this book. Everything is slightly off-kilter, and I thought the tone of Berie’s narration was done so well. There’s a matter-of-factness to it that is belied by the emotional intensity – which, again, is softened by the years that have passed before she narrates the story. It melds expertly, and Moore plays with memory in a way that gives Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? extra depth and nuance.
And all this in under 150 pages! (The cover quote from Dave Eggers says she is one of the funniest writers alive – there is a dry humour at times to this, and the humour of looking back at another self, but I don’t think I’d have called it a comic novel.) I heartily recommend this one, and would be interested to know which other of her novels or novellas to try.
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
If Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is an example of a book that manages to achieve greatness in a short span, then Swing Time (2016) is one which should have had a much more ruthless editor. Or, indeed, should simply have been two novels. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it – I thought it was very good, but could have been much better.
The unnamed narrator is friends with Tracey from childhood. Both are mixed-race girls in London, and unite over their shared passion for dancing – not just as a hobby, but as something which could really be a career. But both are held back by their mothers, for different reasons. Tracey’s is unambitious and can be snide; the narrator’s is so abstract and intellectual that she has little maternal care. Smith is clever at giving two mothers who are very different without simply making them opposites of each other – and without making one a good mother and the other a bad mother. Rather, we see how their richly detailed characters leave a legacy on their daughters.
Tracey and the narrator have a tempestuous childhood friendship – characterised by friendship, love, envy, competition, and everything in between. Both have to learn that their lives cannot follow the same path, for any number of reasons.
Swing Time moves about in time and place a lot, and Smith handles this incredibly well – it is never confusing about where and when we are, even though there are no headings to tell us. And a lot of the novel shows the narrator as an adult, working as an assistant and confidante to Aimee, a worldwide superstar pop icon. Think Madonna. She has been famous for many years, since the narrator was a child, and the narrator is now caught in the strange unreality of the long-term celebrity – a network of people working for Aimee masquerading as a friendship group. It includes long periods in an unspecified African country, where Aimee is trying to Do Good.
The weakness of Swing Time, for me, was that there is a brilliant novel about an intense and important female friendship, and a really good book about working with a celebrity – but, together, they dilute each other. There is little to connect them, except for the narrator’s confused nostalgia when she is no longer close to Tracey. I think it’s fine for a novel to cover a wide time span and be about two stages of life, but when they form two tonally distinct novels with seemingly different purposes, it doesn’t work to fuse them. They do reunite as adults, with a long, silent period of resentment and uncertainty between them.
This is my first Smith novel, and I was a bit surprised by the style – which is assured, but not very distinctive. I don’t think anybody could show me a sentence that I would be able to identify as showing Smith’s style. It is very good, but in the blandly accomplished way that many other novels are written very well.
Of the two books, I think Moore’s is a greater success – though both tackle a neglected topic well, and more interestingly than most of the romantic relationships I read about.
