Green Girl

✍ Scribed by Zambreno, Kate

• Book ID: 107193114
• Publisher: Emergency Press
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 93 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Green Girl is the Bell Jar for today -- an existential novel about Ruth, a young American in London, kin to Jean Seberg gamines and contemporary celebutantes. Ruth works a string of meaningless jobs: perfume spritzer at a department store she calls Horrid's, clothes-folder, and a shop-girl at a sex shop. Ruth is looked at constantly-- something she craves and abhors. She is followed by a mysterious narrator, the voice equally violent and maternal. Ruth and her toxic friend, Agnes, are obsessed with cosmetics and fashion and film, with boys, with themselves, and with each other. Green Girl is about that important and frightening and exhilarating period of being adrift and screwing up, a time when drunken hook-ups and infatuations, nervous breakdowns, and ecstatic epiphanies are the order of the day. Named a best book of 2011 by Roxane Gay and Dennis Cooper. Chosen as a finalist for the 2012 The Morning News' Tournament of Books.

Review

The book is by turns bildungsroman , sociological study, deconstruction, polemic, and live-streamed dialogue with Jean Rhys, Clarice Lispector, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, the Bible, Roland Barthes, and most of Western European modernism by way of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. --James Greer, *Bookforum

*"I can’t recall the last time I read a book whose heroine infuriated and seduced me as completely as Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl (Emergency Press). A modern-age Holly Golightly who bleeds Plath and Godard, Ruth drifts through the streets of London in an existential fog, besotted with pretty things and her best friend, at once empowered and emptied out by the desire of men. The skill with which Zambreno inhabits the emptiness of her all-too-recognizable, self-obsessed heroine, clinging to her persona as it turns to dust in her hands, is remarkable." - Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair

Zambreno's cruelty is only the world's, the world that has provided for girls like Ruth endless dead-end heroines, beauties who, if they do anything at all, mostly undo. - Lightsey Darst, Bookslut

It cracks, it zings. It makes you call your girlfriend and read sections aloud over the phone. --Jessa Crispin, Kirkus Reviews

The best word to describe Kate Zambreno's Green Girl is searing. - Roxane Gay

As an artist, Kate Zambreno is profoundly non-complacent, and this is the book for all of us ready to confront our own complacency. This is a vital book, a necessary book, a book I will long treasure. - Tim Jones-Yelvington, The Lit Pub

Ruth the green girl is a character I recognize from life -- the ingénue shopgirl and pixie libertine wandering a vast loveless city, hounded by the devouring gaze of a society that looks and looks but never sees the person beneath the pretty feminine surface. This is the story of that yet-to-be-formed person, a scene-by-scene treatment of the role she's been scripted to play. Kate Zambreno writes with the clear eyes and steady hand of a vérité filmmaker, beckoning her Ruth toward a self-redemption that hangs just out of reach, like the existential epigraphs haunting the upper margins of every chapter. What emerges is a book of feminist pre-awakening, of an author and a character in search of one another and themselves. --Pamela Lu

Zambreno's Ruth is literature's lost girl, the ambivalent offspring of Lispector's Macabea, Rhys' Sasha Jensen, and Plath's Esther Greenwood. A pretty, dazed American ingénue wandering the wet streets of London in search of the best little black dress, the perfect pink rouge, to make her complete. And what exactly makes Ruth so incomplete? It's the void behind her painted face, the hollow center that draws us into our green girl, our "question mark, a mystery even unto herself." For what Zambreno does ingeniously, ruthlessly, is implicate Ruth's impenetrable vacancy as our own. A harrowing, brilliant book. --Kate Durbin

Not since Faulkner first arrested my heart and stole my breath in The Sound and the Fury have I been as ravaged by the language of a novel as in Kate Zambreno's Green Girl. There is a poetics of desire shivering in the skin of every line. There is a momentous psychosexual arrival in her deformations of diction and syntax - as if language itself were intimate with the body of a girl. Read this book if you dare the wrath of signification: "She throws herself into the crowd . . . The ecstasy of commotion . . . and scream." --Lidia Yuknavitch

About the Author

Kate Zambreno is the author of the novels O Fallen Angel and Green Girl. Heroines , a critical memoir revolving around her obsession with the women of modernism will be published by Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents series this fall.