OPINION:
BENNINGTON GIRLS ARE EASY
By Charlotte Silver
Alfred. Knopf, $24.99, 320 pages
“Bennington Girls Are Easy” has a title and cover that scream “chick-lit,” but author Charlotte Silver has written a novel that is more than that. Her chicks, Cassandra Puffin and Sylvie Furst, start out as excited, ditzy, newly minted alums of Bennington College trying to make it in New York. They get lots of jobs and guys and French lingerie and Italian soap, and, of course, they have fun. But as they field easy catches and foul balls they wise up and metamorphose into edgy women whose lives are lonelier and tougher than they — or any chick-lit heroine — ever expected.
Cassandra and Sylvie meet as 14-year-olds in Cambridge, Mass., and as 14-year-old girls so often do, they fall in love and become instant best friends, learning “in a single afternoon what it would have taken two grown women to learn in a year.” They stay best friends in Bennington, then zip through a series of jobs. The main chance Sylvie has her eye on is New York. Cassandra focuses on men: She prefers them “upper-class and intellectual with a fine sadistic verbal edge.” Eventually she gets to New York too, living happily for a time with Sylvie, helping her out with money, even accompanying her to babysitting jobs. But mostly what she does is enjoy her creature comforts, including black-tie events and overnights at the Harvard Club with her boyfriend, and later, sapphire earrings from the guy who pays the rent on her apartment.
New York City also becomes home to several old pals from Bennington, chief among them Gala Gubelman, “famous campus beauty and kleptomaniac … and generally held to be a nymphomaniac.” Then there’s Pansy Chapin “out to nab a rich husband,” and a host of alums such as Angelica Rocky-Divine, Bitsy Citron and Vicky Lalage. Most are rich and sexually hyperactive.
Cassandra and Sylvie are not in their financial class. Clearly, they are rich enough to be sent to Bennington and Cassandra often seems to have cash to throw around, but they are not super-rich, so inexorably life in New York squeezes them. Beautiful, competent Sylvie responds by thriftiness that segues into tight-fistedness and stealing toilet rolls because that’s so easy to do so why buy them? Cassandra pursues the dream of a wealthy husband into Manhattan, where she finds herself the fall girl for Pansy Chapin, and ends up having to pawn her grandmother’s wedding silver to extricate herself.
By the end of the novel, author Charlotte Silver has shepherded her characters through a coming of age — not the classic coming of age from teen to adulthood, but from 22-year-old know-it-all to wised-up women, with the confident carriage and worldly edge that marks them as New Yorkers. But what have they learned in New York? Sylvie has accumulated lots of practical knowledge about how to get along, but then she more or less already had that when she arrived. Cassandra learns how to find rich men. But the fates of both of them depend on their character, and on what they learned at Bennington — though not in the classroom, which seems to influence neither themselves nor any of the other fictional Bennington alums.
This steely view of character development is one of the bleaker aspects of this novel. Another is the sheer level of callous behavior, some of it in the face of trauma. But much of this is glossed over — or sped by — as Charlotte Silver enjoys her characters’ silliness, appreciates their courage, evokes their looks, their clothes, their food and their often Herculean efforts to get where they want to go. She’s snarky at times, but mostly treats Cassandra and Sylvie like an indulgent grandmother: letting many solecisms pass; not criticizing too much, but not deceived, either. She’s a satirist who is often happy to laugh at and with her characters rather than skewer them.
Readers will find a lot to laugh at, too, and all but the sternest moralist will find some liking for Sylvie, Cassandra and their friends, especially Gala, the most faithful of them. Readers might also decide this often funny book is chick-lit — it’s certainly one you could read on your vacation — but it is chick-lit with a steel core and something fairly serious to say about friendship, college education, first jobs in today’s world, and sex and the single girl.
• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.
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