‘Certain Girls’ not quite as ‘Good’
“Certain Girls”
by Jennifer Weiner (Washington Square Press, 400 pages, $15)
In the past decade, Jennifer Weiner has ridden the chick-lit wave straight to Hollywood, aloft on a string of hit books that feature wisecracking, zaftig heroines who endure humiliating heartbreaks, family estrangements and fat jokes galore, but always come out on top.
If the heroines are thinly veiled versions of Weiner herself, what of it? She is a marvelously supple writer, equally deft at comedy and tragedy, tenderness and hilarious one-liners.
What’s more, Weiner wastes little time on the soft-core porn shopping sequences that riddle the genre. Instead, she focuses her gimlet eye on relationships – romantic, of course, but even more powerfully on the bond between sisters, fathers and daughters, and now, with “Certain Girls,” mothers and daughters.
“Good in Bed,” which rocketed Weiner to fame in 2001, featured Cannie Shapiro, whose life collapses after her boyfriend journals his shame about loving a fat girl in a national magazine.
He flees to Europe, leaving Cannie pregnant, then alone with a premature baby. A journalist, she details her story in a book that becomes a publishing phenomenon.
“Certain Girls” picks up 13 years later. Baby Joy is growing up, sweet and slender, yet on the cusp of those icky teen years. Cannie is a hovering mother who not only picks up Joy from school every day, but also offers a well-balanced dinner and helps with homework each night.
Like any self-respecting teenager, Joy resents this. She also resents her mother’s weight, her loud laughter, her blithe disregard for what the other mothers do for their entitled offspring. It’s bat mitzvah time for Joy and her friends, darn it! This is serious stuff.
Joy tries to penetrate the cool-kid group at school, and its members show a sudden interest in her when they discover her mom’s best seller, loaded with sex, swearing and ragged emotion. She wants the unvarnished version of her birth, but the more she digs, the more the reader loses interest.
What gave “Good in Bed” such authenticity was the raging, original voice of a heavyset character tired of being judged by her shape. “Certain Girls” dribbles through stock scenes: the mother-daughter shopping trip gone awry, the daughter chafing for more independence, the mom finding it hard to let go.
Weiner spends far too much time fluffing the huge cultural impact made by Cannie’s book and Cannie herself, further blurring the line between author and character.
But just when you’re bored, she throws in a whiplash plot twist. It might be abrupt, and it might be manipulative, but you won’t be able to stop reading.
Too bad the same can’t be said about the previous 300 pages.