Nellcott is My Darling by Golda Fried

Sunday, June 5, 2005

Golda Fried's Alice probably would agree with Alfred Lord Tennyson that "it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Alice, 18 and a studious college freshman, finds herself in a looking-glass world, pursued by a kooky combination of the White Knight and the Red Queen, a mixed-up guy all of 23 named Nellcott.

Being loved by Nellcott isn't always fun. He has rules. She must never buy him clothes. He hates mushrooms. He wears mascara and cuts his own hair. He's decent to her while he waits for her to decide to give up her virginity, but then one night he burns her with a cigarette. That should be the end, but as Alice tells one of her friends when he's not with her, "It feels like I've lost my shadow."

Fried, a Greensboro author who teaches writing at GTCC, keeps her sentences short and her narrative rolling with youthful wisdom and piercing humor. Describing a friend's boyfriend, Alice reveals, "How he owned anything, let alone a (night)club, was very perplexing. He veered towards the walls when he walked to Allegra's room. This guy was over forty. It was creepy."

One assumes that some of this book is autobiographical as Fried, like Alice, is Canadian and went to college in Montreal. The novel speaks with the voice of its generation. Alice's earnestness can make you laugh out loud. Her little group of friends starts a film society and decides to sell Pop-Tarts instead of popcorn because, she convinces them, "Pop-Tarts will be cool. Pop-Tarts will create lifelong memories for everone." No one, it turns out, buys Pop-Tarts.

Alice's parents are absurdly liberal, insisting she not work so she can concentrate on her studies, then telling her it's OK if she fails every subject. At dinner over Thanksgiving her dad says, "Everyone at this table who's had sex before raise their hands." Then he and her mother raise their own, hoping that Alice will too. Her father tries to comfort her, and himself, by saying, "You're going to have lots of lovers."

Above, around, behind and through it all is the romantic, annoying Nellcott, showing Alice how to be spontaneous, so that when the time comes for her to accomplish the goal he has set for her, the loss of her virginity, it's "simple." Alice's perceptions after the experience: "Everything around her was full. The laundry basket, the glass of water, the moon."

Fried's Alice is an ingénue longing for authentication. She sleeps outside, takes singing lessons, wears fishnet stockings. Though she has little real tragedy in her young life, she learns about loss as she experiences the piquant taste of first love.

Barbara Bamberger Scott of Dobson is the author of the novel "With It."