Girls

Written when Kelman was 28, on a Creative Writing Masters course in the states

By Zoe Efstathiou

The 19th Century witnessed audacious writers such as Hardy and Elliot proposing that the sacred institution of marriage was perhaps not the perfect solution to the discontent of the individual.

Yet now, in the 21st Century, writers such as Nic Kelman expound extreme depictions of social dissolution. The 21st Century protagonist is not only discontent with marriage but in total flux with society itself. Girls is a 215-page-long chronicle of 21st century apathy and its manifestations; from promiscuous affairs with underage girls to paying a store clerk hundreds of dollars for the privilege of eating a bagel despite the store’s no food policy.

Kelman contrasts random generic snippets of yuppie despair with extracts from The Illiad in a pseudo-intellectual attempt to illustrate the transcendence of sadness. He also feels compelled to relate the etymology of the words ‘cunt’ and ‘cock’.

Kelman’s protagonist is a wealthy investment banker with a penchant for perverse sexual encounters.

Girls is written in disjointed extracts of soulless prose. Although this reflects the lifeless consciousness of the individual, it also serves to render the book completely inaccessible and drab. Bret Easton Ellis pioneered similar subject matter and style through his novel Less Than Zero and later, American Psycho.

However, Ellis’s protagonist in American Psycho may have been vacuously detached and impossible to relate to but he was a subversive, deranged serial killer underneath his façade of normality. The book was original and shocking for its nonchalant contrast of descriptions of outfits and restaurants to descriptions of mutilation and rape.

Kelman attempts to meet the calibre of such brat pack predecessors yet doesn’t even come close. The book is a weary diatribe against 21st Century soullessness, yet it feels that through producing such a laborious complaint, the writer has fallen into the clutches of what he despises.