Local Girls by Alice Hoffman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Effects of Ennui

Back in the days when Archie Bunker was a television buffoon and not the President of the United States, the Long Island suburbs were a region of anonymous mediocrity. Nothing happened there because there was no developed society. The components were in place - schools, shops, public libraries, cinemas, restaurants - but they never formed a coherent whole, just an endless desert of unrewarding routine practised within hundreds of indistinguishable neighbourhoods by hundreds of thousands of indistinguishable families..

Alice Hoffman captures the atmosphere of the Long Island suburbs on the turn, as it were, from sterile but unremarkable commuter land of the 50's and 60's in which everyone could feel superior to the remaining denizens of Brooklyn and Queens, to what it has become: a culturally sick region of boredom, drugs, post-religious superstition, and psychic healers. The only way to survive is escape. Emigration and suicide are the principle options. Local Girls is a shorthand version of all the reasons why getting out as young as possible is the only sensible choice.

I could be wrong of course. Hoffman's fiction may be just a light, autobiographical, romantic melodrama; in which case it is largely a waste of reading time and energy. All the referential tropes are there - the identical houses, absent fathers, the parkways, the turnpike, the North Shore, Jones Beach - but their meaning is trivial without some context. Only as a cautionary tale to the young trapped in the morass of the un-civilisation of Nassau County does the book have any merit. It then also helps to explain why Archie Bunker has become President.

View all my reviews