ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ayelet Amittay is Brink’s summer intern. She received her A.B. from Brown University and her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. She is currently a nursing student at Yale.
JULY 2010
FICTION
POETRY
BOOK REVIEW
PHOTOGRAPHY
Review of Victor Lodato's Mathilda Savitch
By Ayelet Amittay
Coming of age can be a dangerous process. Anyone who has lived as, or lived with, a teenage girl can attest to the dagger stares, the fickle somersaults between friendship and enmity. So when Victor Lodato’s title character, Mathilda Savitch, opens her story with the statement, “I want to be awful. I want to do awful things, and why not?” she grabs the reader’s attention. She seems to promise us the juicy honesty and pithy scorn that are at the heart of a Bildungsroman: a clear-eyed newcomer’s insight into the dark unknown of the adult world.
But Mathilda is not a typical coming-of-age heroine. She is neither pithy nor clear-eyed. Still reeling from the loss of her elder sister, Helene, who was pushed under a train a year before, Mathilda is confused and blurry. She struggles to reach her grieving parents, yet constantly rejects their grief as not enough, or as somehow flawed. She acts, sometimes outrageously, in order to elicit a reaction, and she waits until later to decide if this was the reaction she wanted. In one chapter she claims to be disgusted by sex, but in the next she fantasizes about her next-door neighbor, Kevin. These are the familiar fluctuations every teen goes through, the roller-coaster ride of trying to figure out who we are. Yet, although Mathilda’s fluctuations are true to the reality of teen-hood, they create serious problems for the novel, problems that cannot be overcome by Lodato’s original and skillful writing.
The main challenge the reader faces is a tonal one. For the first half of the novel, Mathilda’s voice is slippery and difficult, swinging between formal, almost aphoristic diction (she calls porn “a magazine of perversion”) and childlike chattiness (“Oh my god, they’re insane!”). Lodato is trying to convey that Mathilda herself is straddling the border between childhood and adulthood, but playing out this duality makes her seem less like a person than a collection of half-formed impressions. Her similes and metaphors are often powerful, but they sometimes come two or three to a paragraph, diluting their insights. The inconsistency of tone is also an inconsistency of emotion: Mathilda is alternately furious and devastated by what she claims is her mother’s neglect, yet the response often seems out of proportion—based on ancient grudges the reader is not privy to and so cannot understand. The facts of her parents’ absence are so much less palpable than Mathilda’s reactions that the wrongs feel dwarfed and undeserving of such a vehement response. As readers, we are swept along by Mathilda’s feelings and impressions without a good grasp of the events that led her to these conclusions.
This sweeping subjectivity would be less of a problem if the book were a typical coming-of-age story, where the thoughts and fantasies of a young woman were a lens sharpening and deepening our understanding of everyday puberty. The novel is at its strongest around these more emblematic moments of growing up. Anna, Mathilda’s best friend, is the most compelling character in the novel precisely because she so deftly embodies the longings and intensities of teenage friendship as a whole. But Lodato sets Mathilda as a guide through a complicated narrative setup. With only Mathilda’s teetering voice to guide us, we are supposed to navigate a world of frequent terrorist attacks, the mystery story of Helene’s death, and the seven stages of grieving. Picking one’s way through these narrative strands is made even more difficult by Mathilda’s withholding crucial information about Helene’s death, at least until a seemingly random turn in the plot. Likewise, key elements of the story—such as the much-sought password to Helene’s email—are revealed suddenly, without any apparent answer to the question, “Why now?” Without a logic to their sequence, the events seem flatter, less meaningful even when the reader needs to believe they have meaning.
Lodato is a playwright, and it is telling that one of the most compelling scenes in the novel involves a theater. Mathilda goes to a play with her parents and watches, horrified, while a character in the play reaches out to her and begs for her help. Mathilda looks around wildly for her parents, but they are in the lobby. Her panic is palpable, precisely because the language she uses to describe it is spare, letting the actions take center stage. Her inability to act, to take her place in the play, speaks volumes more about the loss of her sister than do any of her rages and plotting. This is where Mathilda becomes a real person, and her struggle becomes a real struggle. Her monologues, her endless haggling with infinity and terrorists in her own mind, only come between the reader and the girl sitting in a dark theatre, parentless, unable to hold back her cries.
Crossing the border between childhood and adulthood, each of us must be a cartographer, creating a map of what we love or hate, believe or disbelieve, sifting truth from an adult world that seems defined by hypocrisy. For Mathilda this cartography is shaped by the death of her elder sister. Mathilda’s work—and the project of the novel—is to plot a course through this loss, to make sense of a world where it could happen, to reconnect to her withdrawn parents, and to map out a space where she can have a life of her own. But Mathilda—like Lodato’s novel—finds this cartography difficult. Her path is choppy, sometimes repetitive, and often a non sequitur. At the journey’s end, although the landscape has changed, it is unclear how we arrived at our new destination and where we might be. Lodato’s Mathilda embodies what it means to be a preteen, but the author’s conceptual success gets in the way of Mathilda’s ability to tell her story—and to allow that story to matter.
Published July 2009