Luckiest Girl Alive

Using the literary template provided by Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, these opening chapters carefully distance the reader from the narrator. At this point, the account provided by the first-person narrator raises more questions than it answers. What story does she need to tell to the documentary film production? What happened at Bradley that the girl in New York looking for a job knows Ani? Why does Ani ponder the temptation to stab her own dreamy fiancé as they work on wedding plans? What compels Ani to constantly reinvent herself? Why is Ani an asymptomatic insomniac? “I can only sleep,” she confesses, “when sunlight explodes off the Freedom Tower” (5), a suggestion, at least symbolically, of the beckoning power of freedom and her unexpressed need to be free from something. She appears to be the titular figure, the luckiest girl alive, educated, established in a lucrative career, a minor celebrity known for witty and on-point columns that give advice to Millennial woman about love and sex and relationships. However, something about the narrator is askew. The first-person narration model conventionally creates sympathy for the narrator and a sense of intimacy with their experiences. Here, the more Ani talks, the less she reveals. The more she shares about herself, the less we understand her.

These chapters introduce the formal design of the novel, the movement chapter to chapter between 2015 and 2001, between Ani preparing for her wedding and Ani starting at Bradley. The novel uses the alternating chapters to suggest the weight of time and the burden of handling trauma. Chapters set in New York seem uncomfortable with the apparent happiness of the forthcoming wedding; chapters set in the Bradley School seem uncomfortable with Ani’s move into finding her way to acceptance at a new school. In both tenses, Ani makes all the wrong moves for all the right reasons or all the right moves for all the wrong reasons. In either case, the shuttling between chapters creates at once a sense of suspense and sense of foreboding. She wants to achieve the success model she first embraced her junior year during a field trip to New York. She wants to command respect in the workplace and wear success like the Ralph Lauren jackets she sees in a Fifth Avenue shop window. Like most 14-year-olds, she wants to be accepted, find her niche, sit at the right lunchroom table, and be invited to the right parties. She has a cliché crush on a young charismatic English teacher. She swoons in her innocent adolescent way at the hunky jocks in the cafeteria. She idolizes the pretty girls and their perfect makeup and their sheer self-confidence. In moving between time frames, however, the novel simultaneously embraces these goals and undercuts them, suggesting that Ani has at once everything and nothing.

The introduction of Arthur Finnerman in these early chapters presents a boy who is a cool kid in his own sort of quirky way, defiantly uninterested in being trendy or popular, and at the same time the embodiment of the kind of eccentric and brilliant socially awkward student who is often prey to bullies. With his sheer bulk, his greasy hair, and his chubby face pocked with acne, Arthur comes into the narrative as the perfect misfit. Like all adolescent misfits, such as Holden Caulfield, Arthur exists here within that gray area between young genius and potential serial killer. His insight about Holden being a phony is telling. Like Luke Harrison, Arthur exists here in these early chapters suspended uneasily between readings of his character. Neither figure is entirely what they seem to be. Like the perfect Luke who is nevertheless happily, stupidly unaware of the angst and irony of his emotionally troubled fiancée, Arthur seems the harmless quirky, socially awkward genius that prep schools routinely prepare for an Ivy League education. However, these early chapters suggest in both Luke and Arthur something unnamable, something darker, something threatening.

This section moves to the harrowing account of the sexual assault. The account fuses awareness and ignorance, perception and confusion. The recollection is fragmentary, reflecting Ani’s alcohol-induced haze (she did not eat much that afternoon), her unfamiliarity with her surroundings or even the boys at the party, and her innocence, a virgin’s awareness of the basic mechanics of sex only through metaphor and gossip. She eagerly downs the beer she is offered as a way to distinguish herself and to earn the respect of these boys. It becomes for her a point of pride. When Dean admires her ability to down beer, Ani believes the compliment is “as good as an A in English class” (71). The three assaults come only in bits of recollection. It is only in the hard, cold light of morning that Ani, alarmed by the blood on the bed, understands that her life had “shifted dramatically” despite the callous nonchalance of her attackers eager to frame the assault as a “innocent anecdote” of a “wild party.” Ani thus begins her newest and most challenging reinvention. She is not a rape survivor, the victim of a brutal assault by amoral predators, but rather a good time party girl, a survivor not of a crime but of a crazy “post-party apocalypse” with horny boys (74). The end result of that charade has already been revealed in the alternating chapters in which Ani fantasizes about killing her fiancé and still yearns to tell her story.