Lucy's World

How do you solve a problem like Marianne Maili, or more to the point, her protagonist Lucy Pilgrim in the novel Lucy, Go See.? Both women, from what can be gleaned through the Internet and the declarations of other characters Maili has created to populate Lucy's world, are gorgeous. They are highly both educated: Maili has a doctorate, and she does not permit her creation to launch her fictional modeling career until after graduating from college. They share a career, and both have a flare for summarizing the glory of travel, love, and sexual conquest. Just how Lucy squanders her adventures and her agency is the impetus for this bildungsroman, but Maili's portrait of Lucy in her crucible is flawed.

The moral of Lucy's odyssey is an important one in this era of #MeToo as the nation becomes more aware of the dilemmas women face in reporting sexual assault. However, the presentation of Lucy's life from age 14 to when she is able to make peace, as it seems, with what happened to her is muddled by the novel's technical issues. The text is riddled with inexplicable, spontaneous changes in point of view, when an omniscient voice takes it upon itself to tell the reader what Lucy is not thinking, or how everything will be fine in the future. "She did not even think about how worried her mother might be," we are informed during one of Lucy's getaways between modeling jobs in Europe and Asia. Similarly, Lucy seriously considers whether her beauty, particularly men's reaction to it, precludes her from ever having a genuine relationship with a man. "Lucy wanted to think that human nature was more curious than craving," we are told. But a second later, we learn, "It would take her decades to understand and accept men's disinterest in being with her unless they felt they could eventually be with her sexually, too."

One might consider these intrusions mere distractions. But because Lucy's story is ultimately one of recovery, the introduction of a presumably older, and wiser voice reduces her issues to those brought on by youth. In other words, she is sexually assaulted; then she is ignored, if not taken advantage of by a man she may love. Later, she is bullied by her family. If she were more mature, perhaps, she could have avoided these pitfalls. If some of these shifts in point of view are gendered, in the voice of a more authoritative male sensibility, it could also raise a question over whether Lucy's supposed selfactualization, in the end, is authentic.

More troubling are what could be described as inconsistencies in Lucy's character and narration. While Maili's rendering of a life circumscribed by sexual assault is convincing—even if Maili seems to drop the subject for almost two hundred pages—she seems undecided whether Lucy is naïve, a free spirit, or potentially suffering from mental illness. To one man, who speaks of living in the sumptuous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with Lucy someday, Lucy paraphrases Hemingway: "'It's pretty, kind of, to think so.'" This Weltschmerz does not last long, however. On the next page, she asks a potential lover what a diaphragm is and how it works. "'I want to know everything,'" she asks earnestly. Lucy also proclaims herself bisexual, telling a younger model that making love to women "can be very lovely." Through all her travels, Lucy does not embark on a single bisexual relationship. It's possible the briefly glimpsed female friendships here were originally meant to convey a bisexual experience, but that material has been discarded. The author acknowledges in the preface (no page numbers given) that portions of the original manuscript had to be sacrificed for publication. Perhaps this is the case in showing, if not telling, about Lucy's bisexuality.

Most injurious to the novel's credibility are its factual errors. The singer of "I'm Walking on Sunshine" is misidentified on page 343, for example. More significantly is the...