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The story is archetypal, very nearly mythic: a young woman comes to the city from the hinterlands, absorbs some hard knocks, wrangles with some identity angst, and by pluck and luck lands on her feet. From Joan Didion to Meghan Daum to last year's flavor Sloane Crosley, the narrative retains its basic shape while supporting endless permutations: it's an armature as flexible and resilient as a sonnet. Year after year these books arrive on the shelves, sporting variations of the prim-yet-sexy author photo, the artfully artless cover, their creators relentless and somehow heartbreaking in their poise, their intelligence, their seriousness.
Carlene Bauer's Not That Kind of Girl is of this milieu, and yet transcends it — in the world, but not of it — for two reasons, one anthropological and one aesthetic. The former is by weight of the startling fact that the author, who superficially is just another overeducated publishing drone with a shared flat in Williamsburg and surfeit of male friends with lots of facial hair, is in fact a devout, even tormented, Christian. The second is that Bauer, as was once said of Raymond Chandler, writes like a slumming angel. If you're going to chronicle your inner spiritual turmoil against a backdrop of rooftop Brooklyn beer parties, you'd better have chops. Bauer does: an elegant, jazzy stylist, puckish without being flip, she makes most other memoirists — of either gender — seem shallow and gabby by comparison.
Although being a sexually abstinent practicing Christian in New York City in the 21st century is possibly the most genuine act of rebellion imaginable, Bauer doesn't exploit it as a novelty, or a challenge, or a curiosity; about twenty pages in, whatever lurid preconceptions one might have brought to the book have been dissipated by its author's sturdy good cheer. What is remarkable about Not That Kind of Girl is not that it presents a clever twist on zeitgeist-y nonfiction (the promotional copy, unusually crude even by HarperCollins's low standards, compares it to Sex and the City "with Mr. Big played by 'the man upstairs'") but that it is so clear-eyed about the mysterious yet essential process of self-invention.
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Quite smart that you mention Sloane Crosby (that of course was a paperback original; this is a hardcover). But but: your review perfectly captures the grace and wit of Bauer's memoir. Not only has she written a gorgeous book, but it's stunning that she has emerged unscathed by passing the first years of the 21st Century in Brooklyn.
Yes! This is a book I want to buy.
Very insightful that you define the literary genre by the marketing tools used to sell it--a marketing genre perhaps?--marketing, the great art form of our time. . . .
Also a spot-on comment about how being a practicing Christian is the ultimate rebellion--I remembering feeling similarly as a boy in my Southern Baptist church--I would think, "If I really want to just chuck the world, I'll actually get myself dunked and go in for this craziness"--could never quite do it though--at heart I'm too much of a square. . . .
--J. Boyett
Sorry to recklessly misrepresent--I meant that you describe the genre _in part_ by how it's marketed--e.g., "variations of the prim-yet-sexy author photo, the artfully artless cover," yadda ya. I didn't mean to imply that you were saying that the actual writing had nothing to do with it.
Forgive.
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