Impressions

The Druvy Girl - Sam Lipsyte

Very slick, very economical prose, with a lot of dialogue that sets a fast pace. It's written from the point of view of a pre-pubescent boy whose father is suffering from cancer. A lot of the humor in the piece is injected by the father's voice -- dry, cynical and fatalistic -- and by the boy's quietly observant, recalcitrant tone of one who's growing up quicker than he should be.

The Druvy Girl, Nathalie, is the neighbor's daughter, probably in her early teens, who babysits the boy. She is the more "normal" child, at ease with her own difficult coming-of-age. She curses, talks of fucking, and in every way seems like a perfectly normal all-American middle-school teenager, who'll never make valedictorian, and no one expects her to.

Juxtaposed against this gauge of normalcy, the reader develops a quick respect for the protagonist, for being mature and understanding beyond his age. However, he is obviously taken up by Nathalie. It probably has something to do with his hormones ("somewhere between the mattress and me was Natahlie...") but also with his curiosity and this opportune glimpse into the "normal" world outside of his own.

The conflict happens when Nathalie has him strip, and brands him with her father's "Notary Public" rubber-stamp, and then has him dance, willingly and with aplomb, in front of his parents. (It's a well written scene, with a lot of details.) It's very out of character for him ("We know that wasn't you...") and yet, perhaps ironically, the reader's sympathies are with him, for this brief interlude of "normalcy", between the routines of "playing beach" with his father's puke-bucket.