Nellcott is My Darling by Golda Fried

August 14, 2005

And Alice set out on the road to learn
A debut novel features a virgin at McGill

Raised in Toronto, Alice is a first-year student at McGill. She's also a virgin: "She had tried earplugs but they bothered her; she didn't like sticking anything in any orifice."

So: Will she or won't she?

Her friends include a high school crush named Walker. ("His hair which was long and brown would flip back like a hi-hat on a drum set.") Dorm mate Allegra. ("Allegra went out at night. Allegra was at bars. Allegra was on guest lists.") Former friend Bethany. ("It would be a miracle if Bethany agreed with Alice even one time.")

And, of course, the titular Nellcott. Alice adores Nellcott. Go ask her: "Nellcott walked by her side and her peripheral vision paid attention to him." "He lit a match and she could hear the paper of his cigarette burn when he inhaled." "They left their set list taped to the floor. When Nellcott wasn't looking, Alice ripped it off the floor and folded it up. She put it in her back pocket."

Nellcott is 23, an aspiring musician with uncombed hair and rumpled shirts. He works at Basement Records and is quick with a one-liner: "The key to feeling popular is to buy yourself a really small address book."

The rogue Nellcott is not a virgin. Not at all:
"Your boyfriend looks like a rock star," Robert said.
"I like rock-and-roll," Alice said.
"Yeah, what's he doing with you?" Casey said.
"I don't know," Alice said.

Alice is a wispy and infuriating young lady. In other words, she is 19 years old.

Fried's portraiture is rich in detail and terribly believable. Alice is a useful mixture of perceptive and naïve, and Fried does an excellent job of describing Montreal through fresh eyes:

"The campus was enchanting, even if you were failing Abnormal Psychology and you were hanging out with a guy your parents would be scared of and your friends already were."

Fried favours declarative sentences that stay on the attractive side of didactic: "When they walked past Pier One Imports, a store where newly married people bought dishes and placemats, Allegra stopped and stared at the windows like she was star-struck."

Indeed, Fried likes to make strange and beautiful with language:
"She had waited for it like a telephone wire waiting for birds to come"
"There were girls in vintage dresses who looked like walking wallpaper."
"Alice felt like a little teacup full of fear."

Numerous delicate, surreal-real episodes blink through the novel. When wannabe auteur and old crush Walker talks of moving to Los Angeles after graduation, he observes that, "I'm gonna be in bed with a bunch of phones." Nellcott is the sort of novel in which Fried most likely meant "phones," not "phonies."

Like fellow Coach House author Jonathan Goldstein (whose influence looms large here), Fried would rather create a delicate aside then strain for a big laugh. Most sections conclude with a light, wry coda, a nonsense joke disguised as an aphorism: "These people were her family. Even Robert, who went to the buffet table only once."

Often, the emotional volume is faint. "The sound floated by scratchy and it sounded like rain," is Alice describing a record revolving, but the metaphor serves equally well as a tonal description of this lo-fi novel.

Hal Niedzviecki, in his book We Want Some Too, describes Fried's short story collection Darkness Then a Blown Kiss as "a world where the little things are always at stake, where every encounter is a semiotic plunge into the heart of pop culture." Likewise, tiny details are important in Nellcott, insofar as the novel lacks many large moments.

Her tiny dorm room reminds her of the "the trash-compactor scene in Star Wars," she attends a party in "a cream-coloured lace top that she had seen Courtney Love wear in a band photo" and she attempts to sway Nellcott by pulling "at his elbow, feeling like she was begging her parents for a Happy Meal."

The main tension in this novel is sexual, building toward a literal climax. It is not if but when — and with whom.

At times, Nellcott, like Emily Pohl-Weary's A Girl Named Sugar and Ibi Kaslik's Skinny, criss-crosses the hazy distinction between adult and Young Adult fiction. However, if this were a true YA novel (as opposed to a novel about a young adult), Alice would stop being a virgin at the halfway mark and spend the rest of the book dealing with Feelings and Consequences. Here, the deed occurs on the penultimate page, an anticlimax that, unfortunately, satisfies no one.

Toronto writer Ryan Bigge is the author of A Very Lonely Planet (Arsenal Pulp Press).