Book Review: Pretty Is

Pretty Isby Maggie MitchellHenry Holt, 2015At the beginning of Maggie Mitchell's deliciously good debut novel Pretty Is, Lois Lonsdale, assistant professor of English at a college in upstate New York, is watching a movie on TV at night when she recognizes the face of one of the bit-part actors. She scrutinizes the credits for a name: Chloe Savage, but this hardly deters her – she knows perfectly well that “Chloe Savage” is a stage name, and the reason she knows this is because she has some experience with hidden identities herself, having written a “modestly selling” book called Deep in the Woods under the pen-name Lucy Ledger.And the connection goes even deeper, since she and “Chloe Savage” - the woman she knows to be Carly May Smith – share a singular experience as dramatic as any late-night movie: years ago, they were both abducted by the same strangers, driven across the country, and held in his cabin for two months before being rescued. They'd called him “Zed,” and he hadn't harmed them, although danger had always hovered around the weird interlude; when Carly May reflects on her initial abduction, the oddly pleasant freedom her much-younger self felt at leaving home and seeing new places, her recollections only flirt with personal danger, “You never know who's out there, or what crazy things they'll do, he said when I saw the gun, as if he wanted to make sure I understood that the gun was not intended for me but for troublesome strangers we might meet on the road,” she recalls. “He sounded apologetic, a little embarrassed.” For young Carly May, a child beauty pageant candidate bossed and micro-managed by her mother, “Zed” represents almost a kind of deliverance:

When the radio was off, I could see out of the corner of my eye that his hands were relaxed on the steering wheel, and somehow that made me feel safe. Every now and then he would glance over at me and give me a little smile: an uncle smile, I thought, or maybe a teacher smile, although I had no uncles and my teachers had so far mostly been anxious young women with permed hair and sad, flowered blouses.

Lois is far more ambivalent about their kidnapping, and in some ways it works itself deeper into her being. She writes Deep in the Woods based on the experience, and she specializes in disturbing abduction literature, attempting to teach some of its archetypal texts to her bored students:

I've been teaching Samuel Richardson's Pamela in my class on the British novel. My plan is to get it out of the way early in the semester and then move on to the fun stuff. More fun, I mean; I admit that it's relative. I am trying to persuade my skeptical students that Pamela is, in fact, fun. It's an epistolary novel, of course, a novel in letters, though in a rather perverse way, as most letters in the novel never get to their intended recipients. But you could argue that it's also a kind of horror novel, spun as a marriage plot. When Mr. B's none-too-subtle efforts to seduce (or ravish) his young (very young!) servant fail, he abducts her, ships her off to another of his houses, and places her in the custody of his ally and conspirator, the sadistic Mrs. Jewkes. The fact that Pamela gets to marry her “master” in the end does little to mitigate the fact that she spends half the novel imprisoned, warding off his attempts to rape her, and frequently unconscious from fear.

It's an unhealthy survivor's stasis, and Mitchell has no sooner established it than she's disrupting it, first with Lois' discovery of Carly Mae's new life, then with an off-putting student who confronts Lois with her past (“Apparently it didn't require Holmesian sleuthing to trace Lucy Ledger back to Lois Lonsdale”), and then with Chloe Savage getting a movie script that uncannily reprints some of the most intimate details of the traumatic past she shares with Lois. All of these things end up being connected in sometimes predictable ways, but that'll hardly matter to Mitchell's readers, since her narrative gifts are so fluid and strong that they keep the book moving propulsively forward despite the occasional Hollywood-ready resonance of the plot. This is an intensely readable and deftly controlled debut in a sub-genre that desperately wants for both readability and control; here's hoping for many more such books from Maggie Mitchell.