FICTION IN REVIEW

1 7 0 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W M A R T A F I G L E R O W I C Z A warmup exercise I do at the gym involves touching the fingertips of my two hands behind my back, parallel to the spine. Approximating this task, which I can never actually accomplish, involves inching my fingers toward each other along my vertebrae until they’re on the edges of a little patch of skin and muscle where I can’t actually touch myself, however hard I strain my joints. Only another person can do it for me. Claire Messud’s characters are generally fitter than I am – or so I imagine – but as a rule they struggle with the existential equivalent of this exercise. Dimly aware of the partiality of their laborious e√orts at self-awareness, they cannot completely reduce this partiality or take reliable stock of it on their own, even if there is some truth to the piecemeal insights they achieve about themselves . Instead, they wander around like sleepwalkers whom a tap on the shoulder can startle and confuse but never quite awaken. Their unwilled solipsism is all the more vulnerable and paradoxical since the dreamlike, idiosyncratic fantasies with which they T h e B u r n i n g G i r l : A N o v e l , by Claire Messud (Norton, 256 pp., $25.95) 1 7 1 R respond to it usually involve being deeply intimate with someone, fully knowing and known. In The Burning Girl, Messud’s protagonist , Julia, describes such imagined intimacy with her friend Cassie as ‘‘a dream, miraculously, that Cassie and I dreamed in tandem, touching, hearing, and feeling together.’’ It was, Julia continues, ‘‘like being inside both Cassie’s head and my own, as if we had one mind and could roam its limits together, inventing stories and making ourselves as we wanted them to be.’’ The phrasing of these happy daydreams makes it clear from the start that she’s headed toward disappointment. And indeed, as Messud reveals in the first pages of the novel, her narrator addresses us from a retroactive perspective of loss. ‘‘You’d think it wouldn’t bother me now,’’ is how Julia begins telling her story. The ‘‘it,’’ we are soon told, is the fact that, for reasons she cannot explain, Cassie has stopped talking to her. Despite the intense feeling behind this opening assertion, The Burning Girl is not fueled by the pathos of great cognitive distortions . Julia is not a version of the potentially crazed governess of The Turn of the Screw; she is not even a lesser Miss Jean Brody. The patch of unawareness she struggles to palpate is comparatively small. Her version of reality seems almost right, o√ in ways that Messud’s reader can sense obliquely but cannot fully articulate . That so much futile e√ort can be spent on these minor adjustments , and all Julia is left with, following this e√ort, is a sense of resignation to its futility – such is the quiet tragedy, or not-quitetragedy , that Messud stages. This sense of minorness and confusion is a mood that one has come to expect from Messud, and one anticipates it with pleasure. Messud can weave out of seemingly insignificant, unresolved stories a narrative tension that is no less subtle and enticing than the high drama of nineteenth-century psychological narratives. In The Emperor’s Children, the first big novel in which she hit her stride with this narrative method, Messud follows a group of young New Yorkers who slowly discover how unprepared they are for, and how unable they are to process, the pettiness of adult quarrels, a√airs, and betrayals. The Woman Upstairs is voiced by Nora, a single woman who feels unaccountably betrayed by a family she befriended . Meanwhile, the reader is made to suspect – though without clear, certain evidence – that what she sees as a betrayal was not 1 7 2 F I G L E R O W I C Z Y so unaccountable, or so much of a betrayal, after all. The...