"The Pretty Girl" Reviewed by Colby College
Colby College, where Debra Spark teaches, wrote a wonderful review of The Pretty Girl. Congratulations on all your success with your latest book, Debra!
“In Debra Spark’s latest book, The Pretty Girl, the quotidian and the fantastic collide. As though Raymond Carver wrote science fiction, Spark gives her readers deep insights into the mundane sadness of the human condition—and then, in the last story of the collection, throws in a miniature rabbi who dispenses wisdom despite being encased in a chocolate egg since sometime after World War II.
In the novella-length title story, a girl becomes entranced by a painting in her great aunt’s apartment. Over the decades the painting is a touchstone as she enters her relative’s space, defined by lonesomeness—and the glamour of having been a single working girl in New York City. As the great aunt lapses into an inelegant decline and death, the narrator researches the painting and uncovers a family secret so airtight even her own mother doesn’t know it. Via this haunting story (which rewards multiple reads), we’re asked to speculate about what constitutes a well-lived existence and why the narrator might have exulted that, after all, great-aunt Rose did have a life.
Spark, professor of English, flawlessly shifts gears, bringing us to disparate settings—Victorian-era London, Switzerland, Cambridge, Massachusetts—that connect because of the self-conscious characters struggling to find meaning in their circumscribed lives. Her gentle humor helps allay their overarching sense of alienation. Another shared thread is their identity as Jews, from kids who watch Shalom Sesame videos to a schizophrenic artist who draws Hasidic men. The shadow of Shoah can be dimly seen on each story’s wallpaper.” Finish the review here.
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