Book #81: Anthropology of an American Girl

Title: Anthropology of an American Girl
Author: Hilary Thayer Hamann

I'd heard a significant amount of buzz surrounding Hilary Thayer Hamann's Anthropology of an American Girl, originally self-published six or seven years ago, now reedited and reissued after it became a cult hit. I was eager to delve into it after reading the back cover, which proclaimed it as something like "Catcher in the Rye for girls." I think that the buzz had somewhat of a Blair Witch Project effect for me. By that, I mean that it was hyped so much that I expected it to be amazing, and was somewhat underwhelmed by it. I found the first four hundred pages of Anthropology to be extremely slow-going, mainly because while I found the writing beautiful and insightful, I just didn't identify with the main character, Eveline, at all.

Hamann story takes place in the late 1970s and early 1980s on Long Island and in Manhattan. As the book opens, Eveline is a senior in high school, more responsible than either of her divorced parents and basically raising herself, watching out for a friend whose mother (also a maternal figure to Eveline) just died, and trying to recover from being raped by two popular jocks from her high school. She's introspective and hardworking and more than a little broken. When she meets Harrison Rourke, a boxer who is helping out a friend by directing a play at Eveline's high school, she falls in love. As a thirtysomething, I dismissed her love for Rourke as teenage infatuation (and his reciprocation as creepy), as something that would pass. But it didn't pass through all the years of college, through her relationship and eventual engagement with Mark, Rourke's creepy, rich friend. My guess is that the eventual reunion of Eveline and Rourke was intended to be romantic, but it was hard for me to believe that two such damaged characters could ever successfully come together.

I'll give it to Hamann, the book did get good-- about 400 pages into the novel. I found Eveline's struggle between her revulsion for Mark and her comfort with the stability he provided to be particularly interesting. But as a love story and as a character portrait, I just didn't get Anthropology of an American Girl.