Ghosts in London

Kate Zambreno's Green Girl is a roar of a novel. It is rambunctious in its language and determinedly off-kilter in its worldview. It challenges notions of limitations, particularly those of the bodily sort: "Today she doesn't want to live in her skin," it's said of the green girl at the center of the work. "She neededwantedneeded to peel it off, peel it off."

What is a green girl? She is best illustrated with a single body: in this instance, Ruth, an American transplanted to London. As the novel grimly tells us, "Wisdom is not something that the green girl possesses in abundance." Ruth muses from behind a makeup counter where she's employed (winkingly, the store's nicknamed "Horrids"). She contemplates life, love, and loss while her best friend, Agnes, virulently babbles away. She engages in incompetent sex—as a matter of fact, all of her relations are incompetent—and is very bored indeed. "The green girl likes to watch herself suffer." She is, at the same time, "a pale ghost." The reader is left watching a ghostly figure traipsing around the city, filling time with glumness and manicures. She rattles her chains in the form of jewelry.

Naturally, this ghost is enamored with a ghost: a nameless HE/HIM haunts the pages, a specter from Chicago that has, in spirit at least, trailed Ruth across the ocean.

Moments in the work are palatial. Events are pushed to their extremes. When Ruth ponders having a makeup consultation done, the effect is dizzying. Of the makeup artists, she thinks, "They flatter you. They are your friend.... They worship you.... You sit greedy for attention, gobbling it up. You are meek, suppliant.... You offer your face up to his gaze." By the time her train of thought grinds to a halt, the makeover is more religious ritual than color-matching. Each moment is doled out its share of importance—perhaps more than its fair share.

The work luxuriates in its own misery. Each moment is a new flash of pain. We watch as Ruth stands in front of a mirror and chomps off her hair in clumps: "Is it masochistic? An act of self-flagellation.... Cut, cut, cut. I am a monument to pain." She then sobs hysterically and lies down in a posture of crucifixion. To be a reader in these moments is challenging: the novel violently disputes the notion that some moments in life are calm. Quiet. Unfrenzied. Some moments are simply breathing moments—but these oxygenated moments don't exist for the green girl, leaving the impression of an exceedingly tortured mind. Her greenness, representative of limited experience, renders her a mentally claustrophobic worldview.

Far along into the work, Ruth meets a young man who is, by all accounts, exceedingly decent. A would-be preacher, he preaches. "I see a deep pain inside of you the boy with the enflamed face is now saying." One can't help but think: exactly how long did it take you to figure that out?

Scattered throughout are quotes pulled from here (Roland Barthes) and there (Breakfast at Tiffany's [1961]). The quotes echo the themes of the text—misery, a feeling of ineptness—and one wonders why these quotes are required to bolster already thundering tropes of the work. The author does interesting work with creating a character out of London. Tapping into the personification of London's foggy breath—think Charles Dickens, think Monica Ali's Brick Lane—Zambreno carries on a tradition of having London act as a magnetic force around which characters pull and swirl. One moment at the opening of the novel consists of Ruth staring up at the face of Horrids "towering like a giant stone wedding cake."

Darkly exuberant, Green Girl reads like tinder, producing a quick and violent burn.