A few years ago, as a book store employee, I decided to have a look at the contents of a magazine called “The People’s Friend” which was popular with the old biddies who came in regularly to pick up their reserved copy. The story I looked at involved a female divorcée who was out with her daughter one day when they had some contrived interaction with another child. This led to the appearance of the other child’s father, who was similarly without spouse. Sympathetic parental banter between the two adults ensued. He grinned. She blushed. He seems like a great dad . You can guess the rest.
Though probably targeted at a younger female audience than “The People’s Friend,” Inside Out Girl by Tish Cohen essentially starts off in that tradition. The main character is Rachel, a single divorcée living in New York near the Hudson River. She runs a magazine called Perfect Parent that has been run by her family for a couple of generations. Len is a widowed, handsome lawyer she meets who could use a hand raising his daughter Olivia, a ‘special needs’ child with Non-Verbal Learning Disorder. NLD, the book informs us, means that children born with the condition “rely on verbal forms of communication and not much else.” The learning disorder is supposed to give the tale gravitas, but just in case it doesn’t, Cohen throws in a subplot involving Rachel’s sexually curious teenage daughter, as well as assorted melodramatic twists to mitigate the middle-aged mush.
The novel is fairly predictable. As the title of her magazine suggests, Rachel is obsessed with being a ‘perfect parent,’ and she is overprotective of her own two children, Janie and Dustin. Becoming involved with Len initially gives Rachel pause, because of the demands of his ‘special needs’ daughter. We later find out that Olivia evokes painful memories for Rachel, when the author notes that, during an embrace, Olivia buries “her wolf eyes into—of all places—Rachel’s womb.” This, and Rachel’s emotional reaction, immediate tips off the reader that Rachel has some issue with a child from her past, and sure enough, it is revealed that she gave birth to a daughter with Down syndrome when she was younger. Giving the child up for adoption left Rachel feeling plagued with guilt ever since. So the moral that the entire novel tries to convey is, of course, that no family is perfect. What a revelation.
When it comes to Olivia, Cohen writes sentimentally about the child, who is unpopular at school and requires lots of surveillance, yet who is sickeningly ‘beautiful’ in spite of everything:
From where she stood at the window, sunlight flooded her delicate features, illuminating her untarnished skin, electrifying that untamable russet hair. Her one exposed eye glowed as if lit from within, the gray of her iris blanched into an iridescent near-white. For the first time, Len noticed her bushy eye-lashes weren’t black at all. They were impossibly dark auburn.
Grace [Olivia’s grandmother] gasped, looked at Len, and whispered, “My goodness, she’s a beautiful child.”’
Outside of these trite descriptions, Olivia is a spoiled brat. While Olivia is meant to evoke compassion for being such a precious little thing, she actually grates on one’s nerves because having NLD seems to mean that parental figures can’t discipline her or control a situation. When a pet rodent dies and Olivia refuses to accept or understand its death, the corpse is allowed to rot in her bedroom in the hopes that Olivia will come to learn about death on her own.
When Olivia refuses to eat unless she gets Lucky Charms, Rachel’s attempts to discipline her fail, and Rachel eventually gives in like a good namby-pamby parent and rushes out to buy the cereal. And then there is the contrived plot device of having Olivia issue “blood-curdling screams” whenever a person covers their mouth—distraught that her means of communicating with people is lost. Instead of generating empathy in the reader, it makes one contemplate the value of sterilization.
The adult characters don’t really fare much better. Midway through the book, Rachel turns into a stupid bitch, demanding that Len ask a flirtatious adoption agency secretary to surrender info about her abandoned child. When he refuses, on ethical grounds, she gets angry and walks away in a huff; unlike the reader, she is clueless that Len is dying—from a tumour ! Rachel continues to pout like a child until Len finally gets her the file; she tracks down the girl’s school, has a brief interaction, and then that’s the end of her emotional pangs for her Down syndrome daughter. The ‘drama’ is so badly handled that the reader really doesn’t care about this sub-plot, which is quickly forgotten.
Beyond the sentimental prose and tedious plot developments, there are also other, smaller details that Cohen doesn’t capture well. Rachel’s deceased father is described as “old money,” yet there are no real markers of this lineage in Rachel’s diction or behaviour—she seems instead like a typical harried middle class working woman. Similarly, Len, a professional working at a plush law firm, bizarrely tries to clean some dried paint off of his hand by spitting on his napkin while at a bistro with Rachel. Realizing his faux-pas, he tries to stash the napkin in a nearby potted plant.
Cohen intends for this to be endearing, but it all seems oddly déclassé given the privileged positions and backgrounds the author sketches for the characters. This was made all the more apparent when I watched Woody Allen’s recent Match Point prior to finishing this book. Allen, a far better writer, shows greater skill in capturing the social mores of the people in his films. Whether the British upper class, or his New York dilettantes and academics, Allen’s dialogue and situations show an attention to detail that Cohen lacks; she just does not have an eye, or an ear, or a mind for these subtleties.
Instead, the book is full of maudlin moments. When describing the funeral of Olivia’s mom, Victoria, Len recalls how Olivia’s favourite Barbie, with mom when she died, is returned to Olivia:
One of the doll’s arms stuck out across Olivia’s shoulder, the delicate palm of her hand pointing up to the sky. For the first time, Len noticed it. A tiny streak of dried blood smeared across the fingers.
To compensate for the lack of substance, Cohen frequently tries to flare up the reader’s feelings: Olivia briefly goes missing in a mall and a “Code Adam” alert is issued, there’s an attempted abduction/rape of the ‘hot girl next door,’ Tabitha, and then there’s the question of whether or not Rachel will stay with Len when she finds out about his terminal condition. And of course—what will become of Olivia ? Cohen provides this constant string of ‘emotionally affecting’ events in an attempt to keep the reader from being bored, but she fails, mostly because her characters are two-dimensional, and because an onslaught of melodrama doesn’t make the characters or the prose interesting.
But then, the whole book is pretty much a fantasy meant to appeal to a primarily middle-class female readership; it is not a book that would try to reach beyond with greater insights or artistic skill. Some may find my review of such a lite read overly harsh, and it would certainly be easier to state that this is a ‘niche’ book that would probably make an ok ‘beach read,’ and leave it at that.
Yet this book isn’t presented as a typical, self-aware mass market romance; it’s published by Harper Perennial, it tries to incorporate ‘serious issues’ to elevate it beyond its predictable plot, and there is a “P.S.” section at the end of the book—as if it really needed further explication, or as if the author merited indulgences like listing her favourite female protagonists in literature. The author and the publisher want to pretend that this book is something it is not, and ultimately this kind of book is the sort that perpetuates the idea that women’s writing is a genre. Only a certain kind of person will be left wiping wet jowls after reading Inside Out Girl , and if it should be published at all, the book deserves to be placed in a section of the bookstore where those readers might more easily find it.
The copy of Inside Out Girl supplied for this review is an uncorrected proof.
Anthony Zanetti's blog is http://rocket-to.blogspot.com/
USA
Your Talkback on this Story