Burning Girl
Ben Neihart
To read the promotional blurbs and marketeers' buzz-lines accompanying the publication of both Ben Neihart's sprightly 1995 debut novel, Hey, Joe, and his darker, richer new Burning Girl, is to note the overnight sensationalism of the publishing industry hard at work.
"Hey, Joe has the feel of a newly discovered minor classic," gushed Bret Easton Ellis on that book's jacket.
"Few young novelists are brave and sophisticated enough to venture into such provocative thriller territory," heralds the copy on advanced readers editions of Burning Girl.
To read the two books themselves is to discover something rare and heartening beneath the commercial exigency of maximizing hype to maximize sales: Ben Neihart is not standing still and posing in the flash. He's growing as a writer, reining in weaknesses, deepening tones and building a strong foundation for a long career. Minor classics? Not yet. But one doesn't doubt that such might eventually emerge on Neihart's horizon.
It's a real pleasure to see a writer exhibit the level of thematic ambition and craftsmanly progress that Neihart reveals in the difference between his first book and its follow-up. Hey, Joe was an expansion of a short story, first published in The New Yorker. The tale, which evolved into the novel's first chapter, introduced an utterly believable 16-year-old kid from the suburbs of New Orleans. Joe Keith was comfortable—even cocksure—about his own homosexuality, while reasonably anxious about a lot of the common ground shared by all teens, gay or straight: family relationships, desires for the future, curfew, drug-use, romance.
It was refreshing to have an author advance the optimistic notion that a contemporary kid might be more traumatized by the generalized angst of adolescence than by his gayness in particular. Unfortunately in building (padding?) Hey, Joe to novel length, Neihart chose to intersperse the joyfully slangy lyricism of his reveries on teen life with an awkwardly tangential story about a sex abuse scandal in a Catholic orphanage. In the end, the novel's two plotlines didn't so much merge as pile onto each other in an ugly and unconvincing collision.
As it turns out, what looked like a reckless disaster as Hey, Joe flamed out at the finish line proves to have been a mere fender bender. Ben Neihart has vastly improved his narrative driving skills and paved his readers a far smoother track in Burning Girl. In the new book, Neihart's crime plot and his adolescent atmospherics don't cross each other in choppy intersections; they speed along in the perfect parallel of a two-lane blacktop. Along the ride, there are plenty of the simultaneousy randy and romantic sex scenes and the singularly quirky locutions—"his heart was a fist that wanted to leap from his mouth" [p185], "he looked up at Drew with his big, melting, brown floral eyes"—that continue to make Neihart at least as entertaining a stylist as he is a storyteller.
Joe Keith has grown up into Drew Burke, a 20-year-old New Orleans native on scholarship to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Because he's smart, charming and utterly guileless (despite a healthy dose of sweetly angsty self-doubt), Drew has an irresistible appeal to the spoiled-verging-on-decadent rich kids who set the tone of campus life: "They took him home with them to Manhattan, to Atlanta, to Naples, Florida. They picked up restaurant tabs with no fuss. They lent him their new Saabs and their new Navigators and their new Grand Wagoneers." They also end up pulling him into the extravagantly nasty soap opera of their extracurricular lives.
While it's easy to understand how a stout-hearted but wide-eyed "white trash" boy from the boonies would be seduced by the chic material pleasures of Northeast preppie trappings, Neihart's niftiest trick here is to show how seduction runs in two directions. As Drew becomes entangled in the sordid sexual and criminal affairs of his cosmopolitan classmate Bahar Richards and her older brother Jake (There are strong doses of heroin, rape, suicide and murder here, much detail of which would quickly spoil a story that's a few twists shy of top-notch thriller complexity), Neihart subtly makes an argument that salvation may tempt sinners even more strongly than sin tempts the innocent.
In the end, it turns out that Jake and Bahar are not so much trying to corrupt Drew, as to cleanse some of their own corruption by associating with him. There's never much doubt that Drew will prove true to his essential goodness in the novel's closing pages, but it's a well-handled surprise when traces of that essence manage to glint through in the book's more despicable characters as well. There's not a single scene in Burning Girl that shares the cheery surface tone of Hey, Joe, but even in this often pitch-black book, Ben Neihart reveals his own essential optimism.
