Recent debut fiction has featured plenty of offbeat, dysfunctional heroines. It's as if the publishing world, and by extension readers, can't get enough. First novels of this ilk have made household names of authors around the world – Ottessa Moshfegh, Sayaka Murata (in her English-language debut), Jade Sharma, Sally Rooney and Anakana Schofield to name a few.
In Ireland this year alone commendable debuts from Michelle Gallen, Susannah Dickey, Naoise Dolan and Niamh Campbell have all featured stories of young women who have complex and often troubling emotional worlds. Where are the women who have their shit together, one wonders? Perhaps they're currently being written into being.
But we read novels for problems (as Sharma’s debut was appropriately titled) that will be solved or unsolved, in the same way that we read the news for the bad stories more than the good. It is human nature to dive into the wreck, or at least to watch through the aquarium window as a character sinks or swims.
Witty
The wreck of Jean Kyoung Frazier's debut novel Pizza Girl comprises a bittersweet account of a pregnant 18-year-old in suburban Los Angeles who works as a delivery girl for a pizza company. By turns witty and moving, it is a sharp shock of a novel that gets us remarkably close to the experiences of its protagonist.
Frazier is a stylish writer who wears her skills lightly. She is particularly good at time, shifting into the past, the recent past and occasionally giving glimpses of the future as she relates the character’s present experiences: her alcoholic father has recently died, her Korean-born mother does long shifts in a supermarket to provide for the family, and her boyfriend Billy has given up college to work and save money for the unborn child.
Despite this support, Pizza Girl feels detached from her loved ones. In her grief and anger at her father, and her unwillingness to accept that she’s really pregnant, she escapes into her job, and into borderline obsession with one female customer, Jenny, a harried mother who just wants to get a pizza with pickles and pepperoni for her son. It is these kind of details that make the book sing.
There’s the “pink, watered down soap” in the employee bathroom, the toy police car found in her father’s hand the day he dies. Frazier gives the reader just the right details, including nuggets from her Korean heritage that add further layers to the text: “I had been thinking constantly about han, a feeling that had been killing generation upon generation of Korean people. According to Mom, han was born in the gut and rose to the chest.”
An insightful writer – “as Jenny stood in front of me in that grocery store parking lot, I realised how avoidance was the most attention you could give something” – Frazier explores the themes of her book across multiple narrative strains. Pregnancy and motherhood take different guises: the unwavering love of Pizza Girl’s own mother, the struggles that Jenny faces with her son, the frequently hilarious revelations of a mother and baby group.
Pizza Girl relates it all in a sardonic voice reminiscent of the writing of Jenny Offill: "'At twelve weeks, the baby is the size of a plum.' The clinic doctor told me this with a smile as he squirted gel onto my belly. The gel was a translucent blue, felt slimy and cold. Alien spit, I thought." As she listens to the woes of the mother and baby group she thinks, "Everything they said made me want to offer them a drink. A bottle of tequila would go quick here."
Deeper insights into motherhood also come when she considers her own role as a daughter, how it’s impossible for a child to really see their parents for who they are. “Jenny,” a woman she’s known only a few weeks, “was more of a person to me than Mom had ever been”.
Doting boyfriend
As with Offill’s novels, Frazier makes excellent use of side characters. The customers who ring the pizza place, her bisexual co-worker Darryl (“I found and still find girls attractive, but only boys can ruin my life”), her doting boyfriend Billy – all emerge as real individuals whose experiences are just as empathetically depicted by the author.
Frazier has studied writing at USC and Columbia. She currently lives in Los Angeles. The California backdrop of Pizza Girl recalls another notable debut from recent years, Jen Beagin’s Pretend I’m Dead. Both books offer inventive, witty accounts of intelligent young women working menial jobs as they try to deal with the legacy of deadbeat dads. There is no doubting that Pizza Girl holds its own in an increasingly crowded field. Frazier is a name we will hear from again. Her debut is a blistering base with all the toppings.
