jo's Reviews > Ghost World

american representations of adolescents and post-adolescents in films and books have always left me cold, if not alienated. why do i have so little in common with these kids? why was my life and the lives of the italian teens i currently know and follow so vastly different? i blame american culture of violence and vice (for lack of a better world), kids' need to find themselves in drunkenness and drugs, when we had... what? what did we have? what do the italian kids i know have?

i think we had, they have each other, large groups of kids roaming the city in various combos, girls, boys, girls and girls, boys and boys. i think we had mobility and cities designed for people not cars. we had walking distance and we had public transportation. also, we had spaces, public spaces, outdoor spaces designed for hanging out -- in neighborhoods (mainly in front of the church), in the city. lots of spaces. plazas, fountains, pedestrian-only streets, small public gardens (italy is lousy with public gardens, unlike its neighbors to the north), benches, stones, steps to buildings and monuments, sidewalks. there are people everywhere, the city is inhabited.

when i see kids represented in american films and books, i see a ton of emptiness. kids hang out in commercial not public spaces, because the concept of a well-tended, well-protected, accessible, attractive public space is pretty much non-existent. in my university, even the box office of the newly renewed football/baseball/whatever stadium is named after a donor. i honestly and sincerely anticipate that soon we'll have to preface a lecture with "this class is brought to you by...".

if you have nowhere to go, and if you can't go there anyway because you have no transportation except your parents, you hang out in malls, diners, ice cream parlors, fast food joints, bowling alleys, or the back of your school. the latter is maybe the best scenario. i cannot imagine a childhood so starkly defined by commerce. i know that kids everywhere breathe commerce, but i cannot imagine a childhood so controlled by commerce that there are literally no spaces that are free of it.

so this book got me down during its first half. i hate empty american cities, big and small, and kids lost in it. i hated the terrible disaffection, rage, and plain nastiness of enid and rebecca. i hate the heavily underscored lack of family life, this eternal american parentlessness -- the trope of the absent parent, independent as it is from the fact of the parent's physical existence.

but then i started feeling tenderness for the two girls, because of their tender love for each other, their tip-toeing around the conventions that allow its various modes of expression, the light narrative touches that convey how straying from the rigid boundaries of these conventions becomes just too much (a closing panel that simply says, "let go of my hand"). i also started feeling tenderness for the way in which the girls talk to each other through boys -- by talking about boys, by passing boys from one to the other, by obsessing over boys, by despising ugly boys. it's such a lonely and doomed love, so unfree to blossom, so constrained, it breaks your heart.

and at the end, of course, it withers and dies, not like a raisin in the sun, but like a dream that was squashed from the start. bleak, man.

i blame this on suffocating locales, sordid city aesthetics, mangled architecture, and a ton of institutionalized loneliness.

i wish our cities, our american cities, the very best, but i don't see how anything short of demolition and stark rebuilding will make them more friendly to kids, less conducive to such a powerful absorption of ugliness that life will be forever marked by it. after finishing the book i slept and i dreamed, as i heartbreakingly often do, of century-layered, beautiful cities, rambling living rooms for roamers, chatters, and lovers alike.