she has seen of “John Huston’s daughter. Her face could have been an error, but some other process was at work. It was better than beauty.” Everything Suzanne does or has, however meagre, transfixes Evie: “There was a rack of clothes hanging and more spilling out of a garbage bag—torn denim. Paisley shirts, long skirts. The hems stuttering with loose stitching. The clothes weren’t nice, but the quantity and unfamiliarity stirred me. I’d always been jealous of girls who wore their sister’s handme-downs, like the uniform of a wellloved team.” Here, Evie watches Suzanne slowly wake up (pay attention to what Cline does with the unexpected but finely justified adjective “gruff ”): Suzanne always took a long time to get ready, though preparation was mostly a matter of time and not action—a slow shrug into herself. I liked to watch her from the mattress, the sweet, blank way she studied her reflection with the directionless gaze of a portrait. Her naked body was humble at these moments, even childish, bent at an unflattering angle as she rummaged through the trash bag of clothes. It was comforting to me, her humanness. Noticing how her ankles were gruff with stubble, or the pin dots of blackheads.
“The Girls” is most acute at this local level—the perfect pointillism evoking a remembered world in which detail itself seems precariously balanced between report and hallucination. Now a very different person, Evie finds it hard to explain how she got caught up in the bloody lunacy of the late nineteensixties; the vividness of her impressions is a large part of that explanation, as if to suggest that all experience became for her a savage version of eros, food for
an inflamed hunger. When she first climbs onto the cult’s customized black school bus, she takes everything in: “the floor gridded with Oriental carpets, grayed with dust, the drained tufts of thrift store cushions. The stink of a joss stick in the air, prisms ticking against the windows. Cardboard scrawled with dopey phrases.” Evie Boyd is average, both at school and in looks: her mediocrity is the space waiting to be filled by eccentricity. Her father has left his wife for his twentysomething assistant. Evie’s mother has responded with experimental disarray: macrobiotic diets, group therapy, strange new partners, and more or less benign parental neglect. There is money—Evie’s grandmother was a well-known film actress—and listless truancy. A decision has been made to send Evie to the boarding school, in Monterey, that her mother attended. She does end up at this school (we glimpse her there at the end of the novel), but as a very different girl from the one who was first admitted: now heavy with knowledge, Evie in September, though still only fourteen, has tasted the insanity of the summer of 1969. Intelligently, if not always profoundly, “The Girls” traverses this much visited terrain—what Cline calls “the brainless dream” of California in the late sixties. There is Evie’s family life: the Hockneyesque pools, the parties around them (tiki torches sending “bleary flames streaking into the navy night”), the first fumbled attempts at sex, the embarrassing second youth of Evie’s mother, the sun falling on the
dry hills and clean sidewalks. And there is the world of Russell’s cult: the black school bus, the ranch at the end of a dirt road, llamas in a pen, footloose and half-naked children too old to be still in diapers, girls wearing “thrift store rags,” at work on the farm. The ranch seems at first hospitable and sweetly alternative. Evie is quickly adopted by Suzanne and some of the other girls; she is their rich “dolly.” The girls are by turns protective and indifferent. But Evie figures out that several of the women are sleeping with Russell, and, soon enough, she is called before the master, and essentially forced into sexual service. She is co-opted in more insidious ways, too. At first only irritated by her mother, she is slowly taught to despise her, in part encouraged by the newly jagged generational fault lines of the period, in which not to despise one’s parents is to become them. Evie begins to spend more time at the ranch. Gestures become wilder, more abandoned: she steals money from her mother to give to the chronically impoverished cult; she and others break into the home of a family friend. The main characters are seen from the outside by the narrator, brought to life in bright, brief scenes, shrewdly examined and placed. Suzanne was once a pole dancer in San Francisco. She hardly ever speaks of her family, and “peaceably” calls her mother “that cunt.” Roos, another of Russell’s groupies, was once married to a policeman in Corpus Christi: “She floated around the border with the dreamy solicitude of beaten wives.” Guy, who, later in the summer, will drive the girls to the murders, is “a farm boy who’d defected from Travis AFB when he’d discovered it was the same bullshit scene as his father’s house.” Russell, despite all the hazy adulation, is little more than a third-rate musician, a utopian huckster who knows how to snag depressed, unconfident young women with talk of building a new society “free from racism, free from exclusion, free from hierarchy.” Outside the cult but friendly with Russell is Mitch Lewis, a famous rock musician who has promised Russell a record deal. Mitch invites Suzanne and Evie to his spectacular seafront house, and has sex with them both. When Mitch loses interest in Russell