The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
by Judy Doenges
University of Michigan Press. 211 pages, $24.
ARE THE LAWS OF NATURE different for beautiful girls? Robin Simonsen, the heroine of Judy Doenges’ wry and poignant Bildungsroman, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, comes to think so. Robin’s mother is dead, and her father, Heath, splashing around in his own grief, has little time for her. What’s more, he’s a drug dealer and user and a junk man whose life is overrun with chaos. From the beginning he has his role as a father backward: most of the time his daughter seems to be parenting him. The characters Heath brings through the house and thus through Robin’s life include a long string of men and women who are addicts, deadbeats, and/or criminals.
Early on, Robin’s grandmother comes to stay. “Goldie” (her stage name) is a retired Las Vegas showgirl with stiff blonde hair, blue eyes, a low neckline, and plastic bracelets that clatter. Goldie also comes with an entourage of shiftless hangers-on that she sometimes refers to as boyfriends. Robin’s father and her grandmother are colorful and memorable characters, but they’re so involved with themselves that a child shouldn’t be left with them for a weekend, let alone her formative years. Robin comes of age in the 1970’s in Lilac, an outer suburb of Chicago. She gains an early sense of independence from her chaotic home and family. In her pre-teen years she befriends a girl named Kitty. Despite Kitty’s parents, who don’t approve of Robin or her family, the two girls develop a friendship like the ones I suspect many pre-teen lesbians have, involving private games, secret touching, and an alliance to the exclusion of all others. Then, on a warm night, lying together in Kitty’s bed “before sleep, in a blind, confused sweeping of small hands and arms, they touched each other.” Robin knows she’s an outsider before she knows anything else of importance about herself. Her family isn’t like other families even though she devotes a great deal of energy to changing them. Eventually, Kitty finds Jesus and Robin befriends another outsider, Freddy, the only African-American student at Lilac High School. Of the sex scenes in this novel, the one that doesn’t materialize between Robin and Freddy is the best. The two have made a plan to end their virginity, but Freddy can’t go through with it. The reader knows the truth by then and watches helplessly as the characters grapple with this reality. Finally, in tears, Freddy confesses that the one person he’d like to have sex with is Richard Roundtree of Shaft fame. It is then that Robin confesses that she and Kitty used to “do things.” The novel’s title character doesn’t come on stage until the book is half over. Lynn is an attractive blue-eyed blonde who smells of orange blossoms and spearmint. Robin works her way into Lynn’s inner circle, but she pays a high price to stay there. In addition to using narcotics and risking arrest and bodily harm in order to stay close to Lynn, she must also have sex with Marqueese, a male friend of Lynn’s boyfriend Simon. Robin eventually learns that “beautiful people” don’t have to follow the same rules as the rest of us. Even so, this realization has no effect on her desire. In the final chapters, when Robin finally makes love to Lynn, the sex has an ethereal quality about it. Lynn accepts Robin’s tentative advances and seems to enjoy what ensues. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World is a well-written novel that doesn’t suffer from the rough patches of many first books. However, some descriptive passages are so full of detail as to slow the reader down a bit. Doenges demonstrates a skill with imagery as we encounter the color of parrots running riot over a shirt, Mick Jagger’s face covered with cobwebs, and people who look jaundiced under the glow of sulfur lights. Robin’s world is populated by believable characters that many readers may recognize from their own lives. Her blundering transition into adulthood is sure to haunt such readers for some time after they’ve closed this book. Martha Miller’s latest novel is Tales from The Levee (2005).
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