Issue 10: May 5–May 12, 2005 --by Jonathan Messinger Alice claims to love rock & roll, even falls in love with a boy because he approximates a musician, but her life is really more of a slow, mournful pop song. The protagonist of Fried's elegant debut novel is a quiet girl just beginning her freshman year at Montreal's McGill University. Unlike a lot of kids free of their parents' oppression, who cut loose in school and craft new identities out of thin air, Alice is stalled by never knowing what to think—about anything. Along comes Nellcott, a skinny nonstudent who works in an underground record shop, plays guitar and has an almost paranormal infatuation with Alice. The two form a bond typical of first flings in college: intense, loving and prone to both shocking honesty and curious secrecy. Alice's virginity becomes the one wedge separating them, mostly because she's unsure why she is protecting it. Though it's a relatively simple story of a girl and a boy feeling something but not knowing what that something is, there's an hypnotic air to the novel. Each chapter is composed of jagged moments, paragraphs separated from each other by impulsive punch lines. At the end of one scene, Alice finishes watching the Cassavetes flick Husbands and steps "out of that movie like stepping out of a really warm shower." After talking about how a girl he once knew had cigarette-burn scars on her arm, Nellcott lightly singes Alice's forearm with the tip of his smoke. Rather than becoming enraged or hurt, Fried writes simply, "She could not believe him." There's something captivating about Fried's prose that makes Alice and Nellcott's relationship feel like a slow-motion whirlpool. Writing in such short sentences and with such a fine eye for the minutiae of relationships, she circles around emotional pivot points until the reader feels dragged into the depths of her characters, unaware of how he got there. Website © Golda Fried. / All rights reserved.