Emily Perkins's first novel, Leave Before You Go, began with a boy's earliest memory: an aeroplane above him, rising into the sky. Her second, The New Girl, also opens with an aeroplane, this time passing over three - Julia, Chicky and Rachel - on their way to school. In both cases, the emphasis is the same: these aeroplanes represent escape for Perkins's characters, who are always trapped somewhere they don't want to be. London, New Zealand, Prague, wherever - Perkins turns the whole world into a small town in the middle of nowhere.
Leave Before You Go was something of a disappointment after Perkins's superb collection of short stories, Not Her Real Name. The first 50 pages consisted of a breathtaking account of one man's drug-smuggling adventure, but the book quickly dwindled into a series of peculiar snapshots, reminiscent of the stories but lacking their bite. With The New Girl, that problem is reversed. At first glance, the novel seems a straightforward, trendy rewrite of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with some watered-down Iris Murdoch thrown in. Towards the end, however, it reveals itself to be much more puzzling.
One summer, a woman called Miranda arrives in a small town to set up a self-improvement class for a group of suburban children. She is escaping from an affair, and is keen to make something of her time away from university life. The class she teaches is bizarre, and unrealistic. It is hard to imagine the children's parents allowing them to participate in such a vague, disturbing exercise. Miranda claims it is "about expression, getting [the children] to make some authentic contact, to accept responsi- bility for themselves and become whole people", but we only see them smoking pot, swapping clothes and telling secrets.
It's hard to know what to make of Miranda. She doesn't seem to care about the children, though she wants to make them leave their safe, provincial lives, and Perkins devises an ingenious punishment for her hubris. Yet she is also the most dynamic character in the novel, given a much richer interior life than the characters around her.
Perkins sets up the old conflict of suburbia versus the city, coming down strongly in favour of the latter. Her suburban characters are an unhappy lot. Miranda has an affair with one girl's father, a sad alcoholic who makes the fatal (in Miranda's eyes) mistake of believing it is classy to give her a copy of Emily Dickinson's poems. Some of the kids have a hometown pride but, on the whole, their lives are presented as sad and meaningless. Even the prose has a desultory quality, as if Perkins is deliberately muting her poetic gifts to prevent the reader from finding beauty in the world she describes. This is a shame, because one of the qualities that distinguish Perkins from her peers is her skill with metaphor and simile.
The final part of the novel comes alive with a convincing (and funny) portrayal of student life, when Julia finally makes it to the university where Miranda teaches. Miranda gets her comeuppance, and a series of dramatic events occur in the town they have left behind. Suddenly the book becomes much deeper and more mysterious. There is no real sense of conclusion, and it is almost as if the beginning of a new novel had been tagged on to a separate novella. Perkins is definitely a talented writer, but next time round she should perhaps pay more attention to her plot.
Matt Thorne's new novel, Pictures of You, will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in September
