Evelyn Lau, a twenty-two year old writer in Vancouver, B.C., makes the phone call Lolita never made with her fourth book, Fresh Girls & Other Stories. Lau ominously reveals the empty ugliness of such exploitative sex from the point of view of the "fresh girls," how eyes the color of honey can change to mud.
These stories are graphic but not erotic or pornographic, because those traditional genres are predicated on arousing the reader. Lau doesn't want to arouse the reader, but perhaps disgust him. She's a clear unblinking eye, offering no authorial voice to lessen the harsh nihilism of these peoples' experiences. Lau doesn't brutalize the reader; she offers her a melancholy vantage onto the characters' dehumanization of each other.
Eight of the 10 stories are strong and well-written. The title story captures in sharp detail the grim dailiness of a prostitution operation in the back rooms of a massage parlor. Lau's poetry, collected in You Are Not Who You Claim (Press Porcepic, 1990) and in Oedipal Dreams (Beach Holme, 1992), shines through her excellent word choice. As the heroin flows from her vein to her brain, the narrator of "Fresh Girls" is "leaning back against the back of the sofa real fast, tasting the taste of it come up in my throat, like silver or copper or one of those metals, and that slivered feeling all along the back of my neck and shoulders, where it'll hurt the next morning." Her story "Pleasure" offers a perfect jump between a woman's and a man's consciousness.
These are not stories set in time and the abundant world, but sharp moments, constricted encounters with pain. Lau is not concerned with showing her characters' past, but with their loathsome now, the now where inflicted pain is the only antidote to time and aging. There is no journey, only a stage with scenes of pairs making hate. Lau's fresh girls are not guides, not idealized Beatrices leading us through the sexual inferno; they are so very lost themselves. And as Nabokov reminds us through Humbert Humbert, Beatrice was nine when Dante first fell in love with her.
Lau's characters are the disembodied, without souls, without pleasure. They hate bodies: their own and others. The nameless he in the "Old Man" tries on different names for the young woman he hires: "Barbie," "Cuddles," "Lolita." When she suggests her real name he shakes his head, "Absolutely not, ... no way, that isn't you at all." He labels her body parts: dubbing her breasts, "the girls," her vagina, "the lady." Acts of sadism and masochism help Lau's characters find detachment from their bodies. The woman with the condo and the career in "Pleasure," who has returned for a second night of bondage, describes her agony as "Someone was still crying."
What Lau's characters own is pain and nursed rage, which has not yet erupted into anger. The young woman in "Mercy," who is torturing her lover to the sounds of Dylan Thomas reading poetry, concludes that "We will make ourselves into people we hate enough to kill." However, the Canadian Lau does not inject violence into her pressure-cooker stories to release their awful pressure as American writers so frequently do, who use violence as an antacid in their fiction.
Lau's first book, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, which became a Canadian bestseller, is the urtext to the stories in Fresh Girls. Runaway is Lau's observant, powerful record of her first two years' journey through suicide attempts, psychosis, drugs, prostitution, and wise psychiatric counseling after she ran away at age 14 from her emotionally abusive, domineering mother and withdrawn father.
The central horror in Runaway is Lau's conclusion "that the pain of what I have gone through since leaving home is far less than the pain I experienced at home." On the street Lau found only "slices of hell," while her struggling Chinese immigrant home was "one swallowing endless hell shut in a bedroom looking out the window."
Lau, in fleeing her family, was looking for the emotional space to pursue her writing gift. She has earned that space. She has paid an unfathomable price. What Lau learned from the streets, and what she lets her characters discover is that, unimaginable as it may be, life can always get worse. Most of the men and women in Fresh Girls find themselves plummeting into a bottomless center of pain.
Fresh Girls is broken-glass fiction that offers no catharsis. I found no pleasure in reading it, yet I don't expect to forget it. Fresh Girls made me want to cry.
Kent Chadwick's Northwest Books is a regular column about writers and books from the states and provinces of the Northwest. Kent, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in Oregon.
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Contents on this page were published in the February/March, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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Copyright © 1994 WFP Collective, Inc.