by Fernanda Moore
Katie Crouch, a South Carolina native, apparently knows all about the archaic and vaguely ridiculous social mores of Charleston society. In her debut novel, Girls in Trucks (Little, Brown, 256 pp., $21.99), she stylishly debuts Sarah Walters and her childhood chums from dancing school, whose shared social inheritance—the Camellia Society—binds them together through adolescence and adulthood.
Make no mistake, however: Sarah, Charlotte, Annie and Bitsy are no syrupy Ya-Ya sisters, despite the book’s overt exploration of sisterhood. This novel’s Camellia Society is “an organization whose purpose was to gather, socialize with people of similar interests, and—most important—prepare their daughters for marriage to a decent man,” and Camellia membership says more about one’s family than oneself. “I went to Cotillion Training School for the same reason my friends went: my mother wanted me to,” Sarah admits. “This was important to her the same way it was important to have a picture of her great-great-grandfather dressed in Confederate gray over the sideboard and for us not to be seen in Dad’s truck when we were in town.”
Out of town, of course, the rules change. But as the girls head off, in the tradition of all disgruntled provincials, to their separate destinies, the bonds forged in childhood persist, despite all efforts to sever them: “It was as if our mothers had programmed this allegiance into our psyches when we were born,” Sarah complains on her way to a party she doesn’t particularly want to attend at Bitsy’s apartment in New York. And it’s through “Bitchy” that Sarah meets Max, who dominates (and ruins) her life for years. Meanwhile, the other Camellia sisters get themselves all mixed up with drugs, abusive boyfriends, booze and even cancer in the cruel world beyond cotillion.
The tale of sheltered small-town girls striving for sophistication has been told before. What sets Girls In Trucks apart is the mordantly self-aware Sarah. In the book’s finest chapter, “You Are Not Me,” Sarah perfectly nails the wry dilemma of the ex-pat Southern debutante: Yankee indoctrination requires her to reject outmoded, sexist ways of being, but during the upheaval of making a new life, she mourns the solace her upbringing might have afforded: “Never chase men or buses,” her mother always told her. “Another one always comes along.” But in the city, this is advice Sarah can’t bring herself to take: “I always run after the subway, and when men go, I follow.” This failure to heed the rules of Southern ladyhood dooms Sarah to a miserable decade in thrall to one or another unchivalrous fellow.
If the other Camellia sisters pale as the book progresses, it’s only because Sarah herself becomes more vivid and beguiling as she muddles through her aimless life. By the end, of course, she’s sorted herself out and even learned a thing or two, and what experienced reader of chick lit could expect otherwise? Turns out the savviest Camellias—Sarah’s own mother, for example—were smarter and more subversive than anyone knew, and the most exotic and enduring connections can be found right back where it all began. There’s no place like home.
Katie Crouch will read and sign at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, 7 p.m. on Monday, April 28.
