Girls in Trucks
Katie Crouch, 2008
Little, Brown & Company
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316002127
Summary
Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks.)
But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps South Carolina for a life in New York City. There, she and her fellow displaced Southern friends try to make sense of city sophistication, to understand how much of their training applies to real life, and how much to the strange and rarefied world they've left behind.
When life's complications become overwhelming, Sarah returns home to confront with matured eyes the motto "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia"—and to see how much fuller life can be, for good and for ill, among those who know you best.
Girls in Trucks introduces an irresistable, sweet, and wise voice that heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Reared—Charleston, South Carolina, USA
• Education—Brown University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Sewanee Walter Dakin and MacDowell Fellowships
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
Katie Crouch is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Girls in Trucks and Men and Dogs (2010)
Her writing has also appeared in the New York Observer, Tin House, Glamour, and McSweeney's. She received her M.F.A. at Columbia University, and was awarded a Sewanee Walter Dakin Fellowship and a MacDowell Fellowship. She currently lives in San Francisco. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
In the book's final scene, she leaves her characters in a shared moment of new joy, one that may or may not last, no guarantees, just like in life and in good literature.
San Francisco Chronicle
Lucky for her readers, Crouch put to use all her cotillion-girl knowledge when she wrote her debut novel, Girls in Trucks.... In her acknowledgements, Crouch thanks her fifth-grade teacher, Dorothy Rhett, who told Crouch she was a writer. Rhett is surely proud. Maybe her cotillion teacher will be, too.
Charlotte Observer
Sarah's voice is a funny, slim stiletto to the heart of friendship, desire and love. Her spare prose and sharp dialogue flay open a universal need to belong, whether to a place, a person or your own true self.
The Oregonian
An unenthusiastic Southern debutante copes with the cruelties of postcollege New York life in Crouch's amusing debut. Sarah Walters is neither a misfit nor the queen of the Camellia Society cotillion scene growing up in Charleston, S.C. But when she and her fellow Camellias try to make a life in New York City, they find themselves coping in unexpectedly dangerous ways—from standard substance addictions to Sarah's fixation on preppy ex-boyfriend Max, a smooth and sadistic child of wealth. While the formula of young women in the big city seems destined for cliché, Crouch subverts most expectations; Sarah almost purposely misses an opportunity for happiness and stability with the gentle lover she met in Europe, and her ploy to ignite sparks with a college friend goes painfully awry. When Sarah goes back to Charleston and faces a perhaps too over-the-top family crisis (it involves suicide and lesbianism), the reader's left with the hope that the worst is over. Though this feels almost like a collection—each chapter its own story with its own narrative technique—Crouch's portrayal of a young woman's self-sabotage and the pitfalls facing young women in a cold world is wise, wry and heartbreaking.
Publishers Weekly
Crouch's debut novel-in-linked-stories chronicles the life of Charleston debutante Sarah Walters from her learning the fox trot in grade school to her finding out family secrets in her mid-thirties. The narrative is as raw, frank, and underdeveloped as the characters within, each of whom makes decisions that are difficult to understand. For example, when Sarah's relationship with an abusive man ends and he starts dating someone else months later, she stalks him. She also plunges into excessive alcohol and drug use, which only further clouds her judgment. Unfortunately, Sarah does not have any Southern "sisters" in whom she can confide, as she and her "Camellias" talk more out of Camellia Society obligation than from any actual affinity; they, too, struggle with unhealthy relationships and addictions. In the end, Crouch's portrait of a lady lacks a distinct Southern charm and does not show contemporary women in a positive light. Stylistically, the book resembles Melissa Bank's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, but the unexpectedly abrupt ending may confuse readers and leave them wanting more.
Library Journal
Wry, rueful tales of a Southern debutante's mostly disappointing love life. The unifying motif of Crouch's debut is the Charleston Cotillion Training School, where South Carolina girls and boys of a certain class are taught ballroom dance in preparation for the girls' coming out parties. Prominent among the debutantes are the Camellias, a sorority of women whose mission is to "prepare their daughters for marriage to a decent man." For Sarah Walters and her friends Bitsy, Charlotte and Annie, Camellia membership will mark their most permanent attachment; it seems that for latter-day debutantes there's a shortage of decent men. The novel is comprised of linked short stories, some veering off into the equally problematic amours of peripheral characters including Sarah's brilliant older sister Eloise and their mother. After college, Sarah moves to New York City seeking a writer's life. While working lowly editorial positions, she rooms with Charlotte, a fledgling fashion designer who's in and out of rehab. Sarah's man-that-got-away is blue-blooded Max, who "made money with money." His casual cruelty is not tempered by any redeeming appeal, and Sarah's intractable obsession with him beggars belief. She attempts, vainly, to settle for guys from home, or guys she thought of as just friends but was holding in reserve as fallback lovers. Annie, who never leaves Charleston, survives a relationship with a feckless artist to find love and financial stability. Bitsy marries money, which is scant consolation for her husband's callousness—his infidelities persist as she dies of cancer. Charlotte chooses first drugs, then entrepreneurial success, over relationships. Sarah, finding at 31 that she's"missed [her] window" of opportunity with the fallback guys, has a child by an extremely casual acquaintance. By age 35 she's accepted the fact that neither she nor the men in her life will ever measure up to debutante standards. Gentle humor and sharp observation couched in straightforward prose with none of the preening preciosity so often seen in Southern fiction.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. To be a member of the Camellia Society, one has to be born into it. How do the themes of “membership” and exclusivity play out in Girls in Trucks? What would you say the “dues” are for being a Camellia?
2. One of the implicit goals of the Camellia Society—as is particularly evident in the Cotillion dances—is to prepare its young ladies for marriage. Over the course of the novel, how does her Camellia upbringing prepare Sarah Walters for dating, courtship, and love?
3. Love is manifested in many different ways in the book, sometimes tragically. Which examples surprised you? Why do you think Sarah seems to have such bad luck with men?
4. Sarah’s older sister, Eloise, is the black sheep of the family. How does she differ from Sarah and how is she similar? How does Sarah see Eloise as a model—either to follow or not to follow?
5. Later on in the novel, Sarah is invited to a party at her friend Bitsy’s. Even though she didn’t always get along with Bitsy, she attends because Camellias are “friends for life.” What do you think of this die-hard loyalty? How do Sarah’s attitudes toward Bitsy and Charlotte change?
6. There is a distinction made by some of the Camellia matrons between what is decorous and “civilized” and what is “common.” When in the novel does this distinction begin to break down—or become subverted entirely?
7. One of the sayings from Sarah’s youth is “Once a Camellia, always a Camellia.” To what extent does this mantra hold true for Sarah
8. Sarah heads North for college, in part to escape the Camellia Society. Does she succeed?
9. In many ways, this is a novel about home. When she’s living in New York, how is Sarah pulled toward home and toward the past?
10. One of the curveballs that life throws at Sarah is the baby she has by a man she hardly knows. How does having this child change her? Were you surprised by this turn of events?
11. Another surprise of the book is Sarah’s mother’s relationship with her lifelong friend, Georgia. How would you reconcile Sarah’s mother’s staunch Southern gentility with this unconventional romance?
12. Toward the end of the book we meet J.T., a classic Southern man from Sarah’s youth, with the truck to prove it. How does J.T. differ from the other men in the novel, and why is Sarah drawn to him—is it just nostalgia or something deeper?
13. What other books did Girls in Trucks remind you of? What was similar or different about them?
14. If you had to write an epilogue to the book, how would you imagine Sarah’s life five years from now?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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