Citizen Girl
The fact that the protagonist of Citizen Girl is named Girl is not the worst part of the book, but it’s close. The clumsy metaphor of the name foreshadows accurately the kind of heavy-handed pontificating and school-kid attitude you’re going to get in the rest of the novel. It’s not surprising coming from Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, whose first co-authored book, the best-selling The Nanny Diaries, featured a central character named Nan. But Citizen Girl leaves the light, easy social satire of The Nanny Diaries behind and instead sets its sights on illustrating a worldview that is juvenile, tired and unconvincingly pat.
Girl is a recent college graduate, a public policy major (gender studies minor) at Wesleyan, who moves to Manhattan to pursue her dream career as an activist at a feminist-oriented nonprofit. Unfortunately, the career turns out to be not quite as dreamy as she’d hoped; her boss is a bitter, condescending hippie-feminist of the Old Order (who, despite, the book’s shrill indictment of the objectification of women’s bodies, the authors describe as “pear-shaped”). Girl, regardless of her hard-won liberal arts education, is relegated to making photocopies and working on her research projects in the company bathroom. It is an intolerable situation that ends, fortunately for Girl, when an ill-advised bit of back-talk gets her fired.
Girl’s problem now is that unemployed activists can’t afford to live in Manhattan, and she desperately seeks a new job, attending idiotic networking events and harassing by phone every potential employer she can think of. All looks bleak until one of her networking contacts offers her a job, she thinks, although he’s not very specific about when she should start or what she will be doing once she does start.
Her new boss is Guy (if you think you’ve spotted another broadly symbolic character here, you’re right), and he’s the CEO of My Company, Inc., a web portal that archives women’s magazine articles and hawks beauty products. He doesn’t seem concerned that Girl has no demonstrable skills or experience, and, in fact, he doesn’t seem to want her to do much of anything. There is some vague talk about “rebranding” My Company to appeal to a feminist audience, and Girl will be in charge of the rebranding, whatever that means. Girl is confused and apprehensive - will she be able to do this job, whatever it is? - but she’s too happy to be employed in a feminist-related field and to be able to afford a Gucci handbag to question the situation very deeply.
The whole deal begins to go sour when Girl discovers that Guy, his claimed sensitivity to women’s issues aside, is a man’s man, a short-tempered misogynist who is not interested in Girl’s opinion on any matter and at one point tells her to simply “stop thinking.” His boss, Rex, the chairman of My Company’s board, is worse; he’s a golf-club-wielding member of a stodgy men’s club who has no patience for women who don’t know their place. Girl’s employment turns into a quickly descending spiral of humiliations and soul-torturing compromises, and then things get worse.
The plot of Citizen Girl, such as it is, amounts to little more than a series of sadistic trials for Girl, all of them built around extreme gender stereotypes and fantastic moral dilemmas (i.e., Is it okay to want nice clothes and a decent apartment, even if it means selling Eastern European women into sexual slavery?). Girl stumbles from one degrading trauma to the next, all the while pondering if it’s all worth it.
The problem is that there appears to be no way out for Girl. Her world is a dreary, nearly apocalyptic one, in which everyone is morally bankrupt, hellbent on acquiring money and/or sex at the expense of whatever female gets in his or her way. Every man she encounters is a leering fiend, a violently predatory creature who got where he is today by either victimizing women or entirely ignoring them. Even Girl’s boyfriend, ostensibly the second most sympathetic male character in the book (behind Girl’s 14-year-old brother), is not without an irrepressible dark side; he tries to not be “that boy” (Girl’s code for male badness), but he keeps ending up in strip bars with his boozy, Neanderthal roommates, and he’s not opposed to a little date rape action if he can get it.
Much more disturbing is the book’s representation of women. Girl’s mother is Pollyanna-ish in her optimism, and Girl’s mentor, the noble founder of a struggling nonprofit, is eventually revealed to be pragmatic to the point of hypocrisy. Sadly, these are the most positive female characters. The rest are old guard feminists who are shriveled and ineffective, or they are misguided young women who think that the new path to liberation is sexual self-exploitation. In the corporate world, the only successful women are those willing to suppress their own values to become either cold, opportunistic shrews or unquestioning pawns. One has to wonder if the authors realize how insulting such an implication is to all the women who have managed to be successful and retain even a scrap of humanity.
Citizen Girl, in spite of its shrill and childish tone, is an effortless read. McLaughlin and Kraus are adept at capturing the details of a twentysomething internal dialogue, and although this can, at times, become annoying - such as when characters emphasize something by punctuating. Every. Single. Word. Or when thoughtsruntogetherreallyfasttodenoteexcitement - their prose is, for the most part, bright and energetic. Even the gender-related situations, when taken individually, ring true (except for a ridiculous twist at the end). It’s just that, taken all together, Citizen Girl is little more than a diatribe that, like Girl herself, is conspicuously lacking in experience and wisdom.
Copyright 2004 Ad Media Inc.