Pretty Little Dirty

First, thanks Shumi for your fantastic, thought provoking, and most encouraging comment on my last post. You rock!
So last night I went to the first meeting of the book club I had been invited to join. I was pretty nervous as I only knew two of the people who would be there and it involved bringing food which is always a big 'but what if nobody eats what I bring and I'm labelled 'the wan who brought the manky such and such' forever! ('wan' being a Dublinese pronoun usually referring to a woman).
As the title of this post suggests, the book up for discussion was Pretty Little Dirty, by Amanda Boyden. I bought it Monday morning and did a power-read to get it done by the Tuesday evening. Not exactly a sisyphusian task - I didn't have much else that had to be done, and it's a quick read. And it's well written for the most part, flows well, is nicely observed, but I have probably enjoyed thinking about it more than I enjoyed reading it. Pretty Little Dirty is Boyden's debut novel and is, to use a cliched phrase - a 'gritty coming of age story' about two best friends in the early eighties. There are a lot of really nicely worked-in themes - I particularly like the recurring images of body modification and mutilation, characters lose chunks of flesh, are bitten, cut, burned. Hair is dyed, chopped, moulded, shaved. At one point, an older artist, Hank, says to the narrator Lisa that he thinks she is a sculptor and she is impressed by his observation because she does sculpt in her high-school art classes. Having finished the story I think that he picked up on, not her clay modelling skills, but something that really permeates the story - a sense of self-moulding, creation, evolution. Lisa says later on that she felt as though she and her best friend Celeste never thought about the future, that they were just pushing blindly forward through parties and punk shows and drugs and sex. And yes, it's a story of self-destruction, but also of self creation. Just as Hank sculpts the girls out of marble as they float on his pool, Lisa and Celeste also seem to chip away at themselves, whittle themselves away, perhaps in pursuit of some kind of self. It's definitely an interesting book, and we had a good chat about it last night. There's more to it than just a story of excess and lives off the rails though those elements of the story are certainly foregrounded. I'm not expressing this very articulately but I felt that the behaviour of the characters, the shock factor really I guess, was almost a distraction from the subtleties of the story's imagery and narrative. I felt a bit nauseated when I finished the book (it's not a feelgood story by any means), and would probably have left it at that, but the conversation last night did spur me on to think about it a bit more. I'm glad that it did because it helped me to recognise some of the nuances I would have overlooked otherwise. Which is why discussion groups rock, even with first-night nerves.