Nellcott is My Darling by Golda Fried

McGill Interrupted: Golda Fried's Nellcott Is My Darling captures the innocence and bullshit of undergraduate life.
--by Juliet Waters (June 2, 2005)

There's really only one or two clues that date Nellcott Is My Darling, Golda Fried's novel about coming of age at McGill. One weekend Alice - Fried's eccentric, hyper-naive, Toronto bred narrator - takes in a new feature, the just released 1990 film Wild At Heart. On another afternoon she visits a café on St-Laurent that closed years ago. Other than that, this feels like it could be McGill or Montreal at just about any point between the late '60s and now.

This is largely because Alice is obsessively attached to the sixties, and in many ways, even if this takes place in the '90s, she's a pretty old-fashioned girl. Nellcott Is My Darling opens with her watching The Graduate, and with the confession that she's still a virgin. Alice is in her first year of a B.A., has long curly hair, and has led an overly sheltered life. But she's open to experience and is clearly a talented, original poet. What saves this from becoming a Montreal version of Felicity is that she doesn't fall in love with a series of recognizable college guys: the cute jock, the artsy guy, the med student. She falls in love with Nellcott, a Jewish guitarist from Laval who has no plans to go to university, let alone McGill.

In my imaginary film of Fried's novel, Nellcott would be played by a young Johnny Depp. He swoops into Alice's life looking and acting like an ambiguous pirate. He has a fondness for eyeliner and blouses. You're never quite sure if he's after her soul, or if he's a tender, devoted romantic. In the end, however, you can't help liking Nellcott a lot more than most of the people Alice meets at McGill, and you can't help wishing he would just kidnap her and get it over with.

He doesn't, but he is at least a foil to a potentially more dangerous influence. "Allegra was an artist," Alice tells us about her dormmate/mentor. But Alice never manages to describe Allegra's "art" in any way that defeats the impression that Allegra is a possibly psychotic poseur. Because Fried makes film references so frequently (one of Alice's first actions at McGill is to join the soon-to-be doomed film society, and the title of her novel is a reference to the Rolling Stones movie Charlie Is My Darling), I'll risk another one. Allegra is to Alice what Angelina Jolie is to Winona Ryder in Girl Interrupted. The sophistication and attitude that so impress Alice are an obvious mask for Allegra's neediness and desperation for attention. But Fried is too strong and disciplined a writer to exploit this. The hints at Allegra's dark side are subtle, and never disrupt the hypnotic stream of Alice's sweet, wide-eyed narration.

Reading Fried's novel is as close as one gets to re-experiencing those first fearful days of university, when the anxious gulf between looking like an adult and feeling like an adult will probably never be wider. Fried creates a character whose innocence is probably a little exaggerated, but this actually works better than the usual campus novels, where it's maturity that's usually overestimated.

What Fried captures so beautifully with this sweet, perceptive and intelligent heroine is what a bunch of assholes undergraduates can be. Of course they eventually grow up, become less full of themselves and full of shit, but it's so easy to forget what it was like back when we didn't have the luxury of hindsight. Fried obviously hasn't forgotten. Here she documents the little incivilities, immaturities and pretensions that eventually lead to feuding roommates and friends, but she ends the story right before it gets to that point. We can easily predict what might happen in her second year, but in avoiding the obvious resolutions, Fried captures a slice of university life that feels far more complex and resonant than this kind of novel usually does. It's one of those rare novels that captures innocence without resorting to nostalgia.