Marlena

The truth is both a vast wilderness and the tiniest space you can imagine. It's between me and her, what I saw and what she saw and how I see it now and how she has no now. Divide it further – between what I mean and what I say, who I am and who I appear to be, who she said she was and acted like she was and also, of course, who she really was, in all her glorious complexity, all her unknowable Marlena-ness, all her secrets

As Marlena opens, thirty-four-year-old Cat is interrupted in her “too-good” Manhattan life by a ghost from her past: Sal, the brother of Cat's once best friend, is in town and would like to meet up and talk about Marlena. The plot rewinds back to a sleety December in northern Michigan where Cat and Marlena meet for the first time, and as we are straightaway told that Marlena will die within a year of that first encounter, there's a satisfying tension to the storyline as it switches between the events that lead up to the tragedy in the past, and the ways in which Cat is still dealing with its aftermath in the present of nearly twenty years later. Author Julie Buntin writes beautiful sentences and unspools a credible narrative full of truth and insight, but in a way, it didn't feel like I was reading anything new. This is a very good read but nothing elevates it to the level of great.

Why do they say ghosts are cold? Mine are warm, a breath dampening your cheek, a voice when you thought you were alone.

When fifteen-year-old Cat (formerly known as Catherine, but desperate for reinvention) first arrives in Silver Lake, her parents are newly divorced, they can no longer afford her private school fees, and the cheap modular home on blocks that her mother was able to buy is actually the nicest house on a street of A-frames and trailers. When Marlena – two years older, beautiful, and wild – emerges from the barely habitable barn conversion next door, the breath is knocked out of both Cat and her older brother, Jimmy. As the girls get to know each other – as Marlena introduces the goody-goody Cat to boys and drugs and petty crime – they quickly develop one of those all-consuming “outlines blurring” friendships particular to teenaged girls. And yet, as the older Cat is telling the story after two decades of maturation and reevaluation, she drops frequent dark hints of things to come and constantly wonders if she ever knew Marlena at all.

Sometimes I feel like she is my invention. Like the more I say, the further from the truth of her I get.

This switching between the two timelines was used perfectly by Buntin to demonstrate the growth of Cat's character; as in the contrast between the horrible ways in which the increasingly delinquent Cat treated her (fragile, newly divorced) mother in the past and eventually realising how brave and hard those years must have been on her; how young and beautiful and not done with living her mother had been. And this thoughtfulness is brought to bear on every aspect of the narrative – whether it's the mature Cat inserting what she didn't yet know as a teenager or present-day Cat acknowledging how her teenaged experiences were influencing her current behaviours, self-reflection adds both heft and balance to what could otherwise be tawdry details.

Great loneliness, profound isolation, a cataclysmic, overpowering sense of being misunderstood. When does that kind of deep feeling just stop? Where does it go? At fifteen, the world ended over and over and over again. To be so young is kind of a self-violence. No foresight, an inflated sense of wisdom, and yet you're still responsible for your mistakes. It's a little frightening to remember just how much, and how precisely, I felt. Now, if the world really did end, I think I'd just feel numb.

Nicely stated, but on the other hand, does that last passage really say anything I haven't read – or thought – before? And yet, the following short bit, and particularly its intriguing semicolon, stopped me in my tracks:

What I'm trying to say is that day, I learned that time doesn't belong to you. All you have is what you remember. A fraction; less.

Throughout, my sense was that I was enjoying the writing, the technique, but it wasn't adding up to much. After finishing Marlena, I was reading some reviews and discovered this one in The Atlantic. I found it most interesting for two reasons: It includes a link to this essay Buntin had written for The Atlantic in 2014; in which she wrote about a Marlena-like friend she had in high school who came to an early and tragic end. Also, this review primarily contrasts Marlena to several other recent books about female teenage friendships, and as she specifically mentioned both The Girls and My Brilliant Friend – two books that made my shortlist of favourite reads last year – I am forced to acknowledge that Marlena just doesn't rise to the level of the other two. Again, I really did like this read, I just wouldn't say “love”.