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Review by Laura Wexler
Birdy Stone, the main character in Antonya Nelson's new novel "Nobody's Girl," is every student's worst nightmare of a high school English teacher. She replies to complaints about the depressing reading list by asking, "Would there be anything much to say about a happy day?" She would rather let novel characters do her living for her, believing in "vicarious tragedy . . . virtual woe . . . an idea whose time had come." And, when Isadora Anthony, the mother of one of Birdy's students at Pinetop High, asks Birdy to help her write a book about her daughter's and her husband's death, Birdy pitilessly focuses on the woman's bad grammar, her use of cliche, and her problems with "tone and emotional distance." Instead of sympathizing with Mrs. Anthony -- after all, Birdy's own mother has died recently -- Birdy disdains her grief as unliterary and unintellectual.
What makes "Nobody's Girl" compelling despite Birdy's meanness are her wildly funny, searingly truthful (about everyone but herself) observations of dead-end Pinetop, New Mexico, and its oddball, yet ordinary, citizens. She notes the modular homes that roll in on the highway, the burgeoning strip of fast-food chains and the ever-present signs warning "Do not Dump." "Quaintness did not interest them," Birdy says of her fellow Pinetopians. "Charm was a little nothing you wore jingling on your wrist." With the same dry wit, Birdy and fellow pot-smoking buddy Jesus (put accent over the "u" in Jesus) catalog the teachers at Pinetop High, naming them ugly, old, overzealous, retarded. In short, Birdy, who's on the brink of turning 30, plays the novel's bad girl, making one wrong turn after another. When, in the last pages of the book, she finally sees the light, finally sees what's always been right in front of her, it's a big relief. For, the reader has known all along -- even if Birdy hasn't -- that underneath her callous exterior is a big, honking heart.
As in all of Nelson's short stories, the language in "Nobody's Girl" is fresh and memorable. Like many of Nelson's characters, the characters in "Nobody's Girl" are pockmarked and flabby, wounded and deformed in some way or another. The hope Nelson offers -- and it's a realist's hope -- is the moment when a character like Birdy sees it might be possible to heal herself by reaching out to help another.
Laura Wexler is a writer living in Athens, Georgia.
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