The original
girls gone wild

Smith College grads make good beach reading in J. Courtney Sullivan’s Commencement

by JULIET WATERS

“When a woman writes a book that has anything to do with feelings or relationships, it’s either called chick lit or women’s fiction, right?” complains April, the radical feminist in Commencement, a book about four 20-something recent graduates of Smith College. “But look at Updike, or Irving. Imagine if they’d been women. Just imagine. Someone would have slapped a pink cover onto Rabbit at Rest, and poof, there goes the fucking Pulitzer.”

I’m not sure what the publisher is trying to say about Commencement by slapping a baby blue cover on it instead, but if it gets nominated for a Pulitzer, this is going to have a lot more to do with J. Courtney Sullivan’s job as a researcher at The New York Times than it will with the intellectual substance of this book.

Not that Commencement isn’t worth reading. I enjoyed it, even if I never really bonded with any of its somewhat generic characters. The fact that this statement comes out of the mouth of April, the character who normally worries the least about being on the margins of society, says something about how interchangeable these characters are.

But, frankly, I’d recommend it simply because there isn’t enough feminist beach reading. The closest thing in recent years is Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and American Wife. I think Sittenfeld can write rings around Sullivan, but mostly she writes intelligent books for women in a way that isn’t ashamed of being women’s fiction. They’re not romances. They’re not genre. They’re not going to be nominated for a Critics’ Circle award. But they are smart, honest, insightful and good company for the time you’re reading them.

Commencement is all of these things, but for some reason it feels a little closer to genre. Good genre, but I can’t help visualizing this as an HBO series, something between Sex and the City and The L Word.

If made into a series, it would be a boost for women’s colleges. Smith has changed since the days of its most famous graduates, Sylvia Plath and Gloria Steinem. Or maybe the time has come when it can be written about with more honesty, not just as a place where women went to college to pass time until marriage, or as a breeding ground for achievement-oriented women who benefit from an “old girls” network.

My guess, as someone who went to an all-girls high school, is that this was always girls gone wild habitat. Get a bunch of girls together over a few years and it’s inevitable that inhibitions are going to crumble. The main difference, I’m guessing, at contemporary Smith is lifetime lesbians are more open and more powerful than they were in the past. And there are a lot more of what they call SLUGS, Smith Lesbians Until Graduation.

This gives Commencement a more complex and unpredictable plot than your usual four girls and their guys summer beach read. There are not many scenarios that take a Georgia-born belle, a Boston-Irish alcoholic, a Waspy teenage millionaire and a hardcore Andrea Dworkin fan and make them BFFs. One of these girls will fall in love with another woman, and it’s not going to be the radical feminist.

If there’s a central flaw from a literary point of view, it’s that there’s no ambiguity in the premise that Smith is a good place for these women. They end up with dream, or at least very important jobs (except the one who’s obviously going to quit to write a bestselling piece of chick lit). The one who is in danger of having an unhappy ending obviously would have ended up there whether she’d gone to Smith or not. But whatever happens, you know that, like the good female Bonobo chimps they compare themselves to, they will always protect each other.

Whether this remains true is probably a novel better written by someone older than J. Courtney Sullivan. But that would need a different colour of cover. Maybe purple?

COMMENCEMENT BY J. COURTNEY
SULLIVAN, KNOPF, HC, 320 PP., $29.95