Has there ever been a generation in human history more devoted to self-mythology than the Baby Boomers? Casting themselves as idealistic revolutionaries, the privileged, largely white, college-educated Boomers were going to remake 1960s America into a utopia of love and brotherhood: “We are Stardust. We are Golden,” Joni Mitchell sang. Sadly, or so their mythology goes, the oppressive forces of greed and capitalism – the “System”—defeated that dream.
A useful corrective to that romantic narrative is Joan Didion’s reportorial masterpiece Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her portrait of San Francisco in 1967, the Summer of Love. Far from utopia, what she describes is a world of dislocation and anomie: “Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would now never learn the games that held the society together,” Didion writes. “People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.”
And now comes The Girls, the heralded first novel by Emma Cline, which fictionalizes the moment when sixties idealism showed its dark side: The Manson Family murders. The novel tells the story of Evie Boyd, who looks back, as narrator, from the present to the summer of 1969, when she was a fourteen-year-old girl in a sleepy Northern California town. Young Evie has reasons for feeling teenage angst. Her parents have split up: Dad has run off with a young assistant, and Mom has gotten involved with astrology, gestalt therapy, vegetarianism, and a boyfriend who seethes with barely contained menace toward Evie.
Restless, lonely, and filled with inchoate adolescent yearning, Evie is gloomily eating a hamburger in a park one afternoon when she notices a group of young women. “As soon as I’d caught sight of the girls cutting their way through the park, my attention stayed pinned on them. The black-haired girl with her attendants, their laughter a rebuke to my aloneness. I was waiting for something without knowing what.” Cline captures this typical moment in young female lives, when neediness seeks desperately for any source of love or affirmation—and The Girls narrates the slow, unfolding horror of how the feral pack of girls and their male leader, Russell, “dressed in dirty Wranglers and a buckskin shirt, though his feet were bare,” answers Evie’s need.
In a passage worthy of Didion, Cline describes Evie’s first ride in the group’s black school bus, adorned only with a sloppily painted heart, to their commune, “the Ranch,” for a solstice party:
“I saw that the bus had been emptied and rebuilt, the interior cruddy and overworked in the way things were back then—the floor gridded with Oriental carpets, grayed with dust, the drained tufts of thrift store cushions. The stink of a joss stick in the air, prisms ticking against the windows. Cardboard scrawled with dopey phrases.”
It all ends in blood and madness, as Russell’s “family”—like Charles Manson’s—commits heinous murders.
Much has been made of Emma Cline, a photogenic twenty-seven-year-old, with delicate features and strawberry blonde tresses, parted in the middle—she could be a Manson gal herself—and of the hype surrounding The Girls, which set off a bidding war culminating in a reported $2 million advance, a three-book deal, and Scott Rudin-optioned film rights. She writes in a quaint little garden shed in Brooklyn, and is the daughter of Northern California winemakers. It would be easy to take pot shots at Cline, and some critics have, dismissing the book as poorly written and overhyped.
But this is a shallow judgment. The Girls is haunting and hypnotic, and, rare in literature, it evokes the social disorder unleashed by the late sixties—an era that was anything but romantic. By taking the Manson murders seriously, and by showing their brutality and utter malevolence, albeit in fictionalized form, Cline also counters the contemporary fetishization of Manson. Do a casual search on Etsy for Charles Manson products and you’ll find fifty-three items in art and collectibles and twenty-eight items of clothing for sale. Stuck for a birthday present? How about a Charles Manson mug emblazoned with. . . Charles Manson’s mug? There’s a handmade Manson Valentine card for your true love, which reads: “Valentine, I want your heart” (get it?). And why do hipster musicians like Devendra Banhart feel compelled to record Manson’s fifth-rate, amateurish folk songs?
Anyone who reads The Girls with an open mind will feel uneasy the next time they see Charles Manson’s face on a handbag or a coffee mug. Evil exists and we shouldn’t make it kitsch—which is precisely what Emma Cline reminds us in her compelling novel.
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