Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis (review)

colorado review 172 Normal People Don’t Live Like This, by Dylan Landis Persea Books, 2009 reviewed by Jennifer Wisner Kelly While some of us girls of the ’70s scandalized our mothers with contraband copies of Judy Blume’s Forever that we passed from one innocent hand to the next, the would-be women in Dylan Landis’s debut make Blume’s responsible and consensual first sexual experiences seem hopelessly quaint. Landis’s girls pound through adolescence searching for identity in all sorts of unpleasant places—places where men force themselves on girls and girls watch it happen, victims of their own thirst for adulthood , connection, and control. Landis’s stories track the teenaged years of Leah Levinson, a middle-class Manhattanite in the 1970s. Leah is attracted to all the wrong sorts: girls who bully her, clingy class sluts, abusive and confused gay men. She smokes, she steals, she lies. And Leah is the good girl. Her friends miscarry in the school bathroom, have meaningless sex on rooftops while their friends watch, mutilate themselves with razor blades, and get high on stolen nitrous oxide. There isn’t a single well-behaved girl in the crowd, and because of that, Landis’s book rejects the trite goodgirl /bad-girl dichotomy. Here, there are just girls. Leah and her friends might be brazen and wild, but Landis stays true to the schizophrenic nature of adolescence by making them also hopelessly insecure. Again and again, they wait for men to act (and they are men—Landis’s girls have long since left behind their male peers). Not surprisingly, the men oblige: groping and grinding and jamming knees between semi-resisting thighs, while the girls stare at cracked ceilings or rooftop ventilation chimneys or fountains in Central Park, bewildered. Landis insightfully captures the dance of consent and resistance that traps these girls: they want sex, but once they get it, well, they aren’t so sure. Landis’s stories catalog the many ways in which women and girls crave control. In “Jazz,” a girl named Rainey flirts with her father’s best friend only to end up sexually misused by him. This poignant portrait of sexual exploration gone awry leaves us aching. That is, until the subsequent story, “Fire,” when victim becomes bully, and Rainey mercilessly harasses Leah. Meek 173 Book Notes Leah tries unsuccessfully to calm herself with obsessive rituals, until she, too, finally lashes out: “Her fear had an edge and the edge was jagged, like the key in her palm. She squeezed it three times three, but she barely felt its ziggurat bite as it cut into her lifeline, or Rainey’s face.” Other characters find power in a myriad of self-destructive ways: Pansy cuts her arms, Oly takes drugs, and Leah’s mother, Helen, has starved herself since girlhood . Whatever their coping mechanism, we sympathize with all of these connection-starved young women, bully and bullied alike. Landis may focus on Leah, but her depiction of other girls and women gives Leah’s experience universal implications. The stories are not just one girl’s coming of age, but how all of us come of age. Throughout, Landis’s narration moves seamlessly from the vernacular of teenaged girls to the poetic descriptions of an unobtrusive narrator, unsullied by adult judgment. And where are the adults? Preoccupied, it seems. In the title story, Helen tells herself that Leah will be just fine despite evidence to the contrary, and then gets back to her own trials of being widowed and broke. Meanwhile, Pansy’s mother has let go any attempt at control: “Oh, Pansy’s lost . . . I know where she is, give or take a few subway stops. But she’s lost.” Inattention seems to be the rule. These parents are crossing their fingers that their daughters make it to adulthood mostly intact. As adult readers, we squirm at the implication that we are the irresponsible ones. The ten linked but discrete stories in Normal People Don’t Live Like This leapfrog over several key traumatic events. In “Rana Fegrina,” for instance, we learn that Leah’s father is dying of cancer in a few quick comments juxtaposed with an impending...