Green Girl
Green Girl (Kate Zambreno, Emergency Press 2011, 251 pages)
A Small Doggies book review by Richard Chiem
Green Girl was written by Kate Zambreno, released by Emergency Press, her second work of fiction. It was favorably reviewed by the likes of Blake Butler, Dennis Cooper, and James Greer, among other writers, journals and magazines and is considered a cult hit. It is 251 pages in English, set in London, following a fast paced plot through the eyes of an American girl named Ruth, as she recovers from a traumatic relationship, living her life abroad from meaningless job to meaningless job, relationship to relationship, sometimes brutally in a haze or as though she’s numb. The white cover features an image of a green girl sitting slanted on a chair, and because of the twisted angle her face cannot be seen. The cover references the films of Jean-Luc Godard, designed the way a movie poster would look for coming attractions.
One scene is a three-some, involving Ruth the main character, Agnes her flatmate, and her coworker Olly, whom Ruth has been admiring for some time from afar. Finding herself at a holiday party, nursing her drink, very tensed and misanthropic, Ruth accepts where the evening will take her. She goes on a series of mistakes. She drinks too much and smokes a joint and rides the train home half asleep with Agnes and Olly.
The scene ends with the three of them on Agnes’s bed, with Agnes wearing Olly’s red tie hooked around her neck, Olly at the foot of the bed with his penis in his hand, and Ruth struggling to stay conscious, fighting with Agnes to keep her own clothes on. Everything is spinning while Ruth tries to break herself free and continues to gag.
Book Trailer Video for Green Girl by Kate Zambreno
Single Sentence Excerpts from Green Girl by Kate Zambreno
I learn her curves.
The slightest bit of flesh caught in between strap and armpit.
She feels the gaze of the terrible girls.
Sometimes she is struck by the sense that she is someone else’s character, that she is saying someone else’s lines.
She began to take smoke breaks with The Italian.
The train rumbles past, stopping a distance away.
Her reflection multiplies endlessly.
She sees herself passing by, staring, staring into space.
Ruth lowers her eyes and meditates under the hot rush of the hand dryer.
She shudders, and looks with distaste at her ice cream cone, as if startled to find it in her hand.
She wakes up with the entire world inside her mouth.
She journeys invisible through the fog.
First Reading of Green Girl by Kate Zambreno
A review copy of Green Girl appeared almost crumpled in half in my small mailbox when I was living in La Jolla. Working sometimes sixty-hour weeks at a movie theater, being involved in a long-distance relationship and trying to maintain a strict only bare-essentials budget, I found my recreation in novels. I read Green Girl in the lobby of my movie theater, sitting on a bench and left alone, as it was nearing midnight. There were a dozen or so people a few feet away from me, behind closed double sound proof doors, for the late show.
Reading and finishing Green Girl made me feel less lonely and terribly understood, sitting there and waiting for my shift to end. I leaned against the wall behind me and forget I even had a uniform on. I imagined myself somewhere else watching the clock on the wall, and stood restless for a moment in the middle of the lobby. People, by themselves and in pairs, were exiting the movie theater in slow fashion. I realized I had not made eye contact with a single customer leaving the establishment, yet a few walking away into the parking lot turned back around and looked at me, most making no expression on their faces. I imagined their individual lives in different parts of San Diego, happier or sadder than I was here.
Somehow everything I was feeling at the time came out through the book, from the character Ruth and how angry she was, causing me to barely remember my walk home because I was suddenly there, Green Girl still folded in half in my hands, in front of my apartment door.
Second Reading of Green Girl by Kate Zambreno
Kate Zambreno gave a reading in Seattle while I was working, only a few blocks away from the movie theater. Kate recognized and spotted my girlfriend, Frances, and they had some drinks together, sharing a table at Vermillion, the art gallery wine bar in Capitol Hill. The first time I saw Kate Zambreno, she was holding John’s hand, her partner, outside my movie theater just as I was leaving work late for the reading. Frances was there and she waved and smiled at me and I waved back. The four of us had drinks, John, Kate, Frances, and Richard, and we talked about everything and what was happening now.
I came home enlightened with Frances and started the book again. I thought about Body Horror in film and more contemplated David Cronenberg rather than Jean Luc Godard for finding homages and subtle narratives embedded in Green Girl. The scenes move in tension scene by scene, heading toward violence. I thought about three scenes in the novel: the threesome, the moment when Ruth cuts and chops off her hair, and the short relationship with Rhys. I read the book like a horror book and imagined the movie Zambreno directed page by page, as though shot by shot as the character Ruth approaches a particular oblivion in her every day social circles and gradually becomes lost. I thought about Jean Rhys.
Footage of Green Girl by Kate Zambreno
Review of Green Girl by Kate Zambreno
The novel, like the cover, is very cinematic and engaging. The writing reminded me of the novels of Jean Rhys, how her sentences can continue in fragments through very tensed worried thoughts of the character, in minimal declarative sentences, sometimes horrible truths. The world inside Green Girl is frightening and mundane, the ghost world to ours and closely related. A stranger in a strange land: a beautiful American blond cinephile in London, not really knowing what she wants and she has sex.
She feels an immense violence stirring inside her. She looks and looks into the mirror. She cannot find herself. She feels somewhere deep within a desire to cut through that glass, that image of herself. (pg. 147)
The keys scenes I’ve found that would translate well to film, as controversial moving moments, were: Ruth getting mixed up in a threesome, Ruth feeling violent and cutting and chopping off most of her hair, and Ruth seducing Rhys, a boy she likes from work, and then sleeping with a stranger a day later to feel wiped clean.
There is a first person narrator throughout the novel, watching her main character, almost haunting the novel and haunted from the experience at the same time. The tension and effect drives the novel through, in search of something bearable. The chaos in the book is why I loved it and keep replaying the scenes again and again in my head, while at work, day in and day out, the true romance of hard meaningless work of human service and the relationships in the city surrounding us. The wanting we manage to have or cannot help. Ruth ends the novel working at a high-end clothing store.
I will recommend it to anyone. All the stars.
* * *
Green Girl is currently available for purchase through Emergency Press and other retailers.
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Learn more about Kate Zambreno at her website.