FICTION
“Ugly Girls”
Lindsay Hunter
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
$25, 240 pages
On the face of it, the two teenage rebels in “Ugly Girls,” Lindsay Hunter’s debut novel, are no different from a lot of girls their age. For Dayna (aka Baby Girl) and Perry, getting into trouble is the key to feeling alive.
Fun means taking risks, the more outrageous the better, proving to each other how cool they are. They vent their frustrations and emotional turmoil in defiance and petty crimes, and we first meet them in medias res: They've stolen a car and are joyriding down the highway before dawn, blasting their music and talking trash.
Perry, with her "bright green eyes, black eyelashes [and] blonde hair," is the prettier of the two and doesn't even have to try to attract boys. Baby Girl has masked her sweet, freckled looks in an effort to appear tough, including shaving half her head and wearing her older brother's baggy clothes. "Baby Girl wanted her outside to look like how she felt on the inside. Which was (expletive) you."
Best friends since they were kids, Perry and Baby Girl’s long-standing relationship provides a lot of things — solidarity, reassurance, one-upmanship and entertainment — but affection and trust are no longer part of it. “They didn’t talk, really, they just did.” Their go-nowhere lives have chained them together, and the small triumphs they enjoy over each other each day are the only ones they have.
Their battle for top dog leaves them achingly vulnerable. When a strange boy begins to play them against each other via email and Facebook, it’s not long before what’s left of their friendship begins to self-destruct, spiraling toward chaos.
Hunter, who spent part of her childhood in Ocoee, Fla., and part in Orlando, steers clear of naming the setting in “Ugly Girls.” Instead, she locates the story in a scruffy neighborhood boasting a trailer park, a truck-stop diner and a series of convenience stores and fast-food franchises.
Nestled into this cheerless landscape, Perry shares a double-wide with her lonely lush of a mother, Myra, and stepfather, Jim, a prison guard whose job threatens to rob him of what humanity he has. Baby Girl is the chief caretaker for her brother, once a much-admired Bad Boy, now brain-damaged after a motorcycle crash.
Through the eyes of five different characters — the girls, Perry’s parents, and Jamey, an internet predator — we see abundant evidence of cramped lives, generational abuse and the paralyzing power of environment.
Hunter got her start writing flash fiction, then published two collections of short-short stories, “Don’t Kiss Me” and “Daddy’s.” Her work — bleak, probing and raw — has always refused to shy away from ugly. But the wider scope of a novel allows for a much more nuanced interpretation. After laying out a handful of predictably nasty trailer-trash stereotypes — one of the most inspired is Jamey’s obese and slyly abusive mother — Hunter then explodes them, page by page, revealing all-too human qualities that evoke sympathy side by side with horror.
Pretty Perry is not without flaws. She has “a widish nose, a fang on one side of her mouth, a gray molar,” and a bad habit of insulting the people she loves. While Baby Girl, who goes out of her way to appear ugly, exhibits a lovely tolerance for her disabled, dependent brother.
Jamey, though far from the goofy teenager he claims to be, is neither inhuman nor evil. By turns, he’s hopeful, generous, cagey, understanding, sympathetic, shy. He sees his compulsion as merely “this difficulty with his pants,” a problem that will take care of itself once his plan for the girls works out.
And despite the meanness that drags them under, everyone in “Ugly Girls” longs for a way to express their real feelings that wouldn’t “require a trip around the world, a magic trick, some impossible kind of journey.” With a keen understanding of deprivation and its hold over her characters, Hunter presents their thoughts in tune with their stifling existence; then, whenever a chance beckons to escape it, reels the prose out to soar:
"[Baby Girl] pulled the slim jim out, worked it into the door. The lock went with a soft pop. For Perry, that pop was an exploding cosmos of possibility. White tails of glitter shooting out. If felt like she and Baby Girl were mirrors reflecting the light from the streetlamps back and forth a million times. They were light. They could do anything, go anywhere."
Ah, but they don’t. As Perry says of Baby Girl, “it’s two steps forward and a day’s worth of walking backward” — an observation that applies to everyone in the novel. The victory in this tender, fearless look at the down-trodden and doomed is a portrait of an ugly world that highlights its all-too-fleeting moments of beauty and dignity.
