An Impressive Beginning
by Tom Kertes

Normal Girl is an imperfect, but nevertheless extremely impressive, debut for Molly Jong-Fast, the 23-year- old daughter of Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast. “It can’t be easy to follow in the parental footsteps of two such famous authors,” said Lewis Burke Frumkes, the Director of the Writing Center at Marymount Manhattan College. “It’s a heavy mantle to carry—the expectations are bound to be unrealistic. And if you don’t live up to them, it seems like the entire world is ready to tear you down.”

Tearing down Norman Girl would take some serious stretching as the novel, slowly, almost imperceptibly, manages to draw the reader into its weirdly whacked-out world. True, Normal Girl gets off to a rocky start. The first chapter is poorly paced and very long and the subject matter—the endless angst of the drugged-out, spoiled-rotten, monied youth of the ’90s—is one of those “not again” themes that has already been covered to near-death.

However, to Jong-Fast’s credit, the theme has not been covered quite like this. She squeezes some novelty out of the well-covered ground with a spunky writing style and a courageous approach that constantly leaves the reader wondering just how much of Normal Girl may be autobiographical.

The heroine, 19 year-old Miranda Woke, walks through an endless line of funerals that are just like parties, and parties that are just like funerals, in a drugged-out haze while convinced that she may have killed her boyfriend by shooting him up with a dirty needle. The downward spiral of emptiness and self-hate predictably ends in rehab but, as Miranda finds, even in recovery there are no easy answers.

The story line is saved by one snazzy line after another: “Each room in the house is a carefully contrived experience in self-indulgence, representing a life created for that very thing. The Western Room is so authentic it smells like horse manure.” Ms. Jong-Fast’s uniquely self-mocking overall tone rarely fails to be entertaining. Thus, more often than not, she manages to triumph over her material and create a solid recreation of life itself.

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