Twenties Girl - Sophie Kinsella
From the onset I was apprehensive about this book. Who wouldn’t be, when the cover of the book they are about to open is branded with a review by Heat magazine, the most trusted of literary critics, describing the contents as “Wonderfully witty… as fabulously funny as Sophie’s other gems”. I could review that statement in itself rather scathingly. Do Heat know Sophie Kinsella personally? I’m guessing not, but perhaps this undue familiarity is a taste of things to come.
Sophie Kinsella, I’m sure, is an Eastenders actress and being as ‘Enders is the direst of soaps, I didn’t have high hopes for an actress attempting to be a novelist, much in the same way I wouldn’t be caught dead touching a Jackie Collins even with a bargepole unless I was about to ceremonially burn it in some sort of genocide of terrible literature.
And to begin with, I was right about Twenties Girl. Right from the opening page I felt as though this was written by the people, for the people. I could have written this. Kinsella’s style is conversational and colloquial and her attempt to put together a character with whom everyone can relate was only a partial success; an attempt diminished by the relationship she assumes with the reader before they are fully engaged in the story. As a reader, I don’t enjoy being directly addressed with rhetorical questions and spoken to with asides to that inform me of characters about whom I care very little if at all. And I don’t like this in a novel. I like the narration to be aloof, more omnicient, a voice that maintains a formal distance from the reader and assumes nothing from them; I like my literature to be literary. And this book is not that.
That said, while the familiarity of the narration was a bugbear to me throughout, the plot, which was only tenuously linked with reality and also annoyed me, still had something captivating about it. If a character is to be burdened with the supernatural, it has to seem “normal”, so to speak. Lara, the protagonist of Twenties Girl, goes on and on and ON about how she must be going crazy, seeing things, etc. The reader doesn’t need that. And of course it was entirely predictable in that Lara and Ed get together in the end, Uncle Bill gets his comeuppance and OF COURSE the necklace had to be reunited with the corpse and finding it simply wasn’t enough. But despite all this, there was still something, and even now, having reached (almost) the end (I gave up a chapter before the end - completely superfluous writing that neither adds to nor diminishes what precedes it), I can’t put my finger on what it was. I’d like to say it was Sadie and her life, since I am predisposed to the historic and have always said that if I could live at a time that wasn’t now I’d pick the 1920s, but staking my enjoyment of this novel on something so flimsy would be a risky choice and it would probably be considered greater praise, since there isn’t much I can give this novel, for the reason for my enjoyment to remain a mystery.
As previously mentioned, I gave up before the end. This is not a regular occurance for me, as I swear, time and time again, that it is not in my nature to abandon a pursuit before it has been accomplished. But the final chapter of this novel, chapter 27, is the most unnecessary ending piece to a novel I think I have ever come across, more unnecessary even than the epilogue of Jane Eyre. By the end of chapter 26, the ending is established; Sadie is at peace, Lara is happy and Uncle Bill, the inevitable villain of the story, has fallen from grace. Nothing more is needed, surely. Kinsella, however, seems to think more is, well, more and in doing so completely rejects her chance at the powerful ending she could have achieved by ending the novel when the necklace is returned and Sadie passes over. For me at least, an abrupt ending that forgoes a cathartic and conclusive epilogue wins. Every time.
Twenties Girl is a book I have hated to love. It has so much wrong with it and I absolutely stand firm that with a book about how to write a novel and an idea, I could have produced a novel almost identical to this one. But it still has substance enough that it kept me gripped almost until the final pages. This book would make a wonderful chick-flick of the same sort of ilk as Ghosts of Girlfriends Past but in novel form it is definitely lacklustre. If Hollywood were to take this novel and run with it, they might be able to find something in it worth the paper it was written on, but I unfortunately am not Hollywood and while I won’t be condemning this book to the burn pile, it won’t be one to recommend either. Kinsella, don’t give up your day job…
Kinsella, Sophie [2009] Twenties Girl (2010) London: Transworld Publishers
