Luckiest Girl Alive

Something is not right with the narrator. She is not who she pretends to be nor who others believe her to be. After all, she begins the novel imagining knifing her fiancé. In a novel centered on catastrophic experiences of sexual assault and a mass shooting, the ending seems decidedly quiet. The novel closes with the narrator at last announcing her name—that is, identifying at last her identity. That declaration is central to the novel’s thematic argument. This first-person narration raises questions about the nature of identity. Acceptance of the reality of identity, whatever its implications, begins the process of genuine maturation and the subsequent movement into adulthood. Like The Catcher in the Rye, Luckiest Girl Alive is essentially a bildungsroman: It is a difficult coming-of-age story, the narrative of the difficult evolution of a troubled adolescent, Ani Fanelli, into adulthood. The problem is evident: There is no clear, consistent, stable Ani Fanelli.

Now in her late twenties, Ani has delayed that evolution. It has been stymied by her traumas at Bradley and by her handling of those emotional crises. Who is Ani Fanelli? The question is far from simple. In the novel, Ani goes by multiple names and nicknames, and each name requires her to focus on a different aspect of her personality. In the aftermath of her experiences at Bradley, she has never been compelled to confront who she actually is. She has been consumed in the elaborate theater of creating a persona acceptable to those around her and in turn neglecting her genuine identity. She is a respected byline at a major magazine. She is a fiancée of a successful financier. She is defined by her social status, by her ambitious dreams to succeed in Manhattan, and by her friends and their appreciation of her status.

More darkly, Ani is defined by the experience at Bradley, by rumors and outright lies about her involvement in the shooting. She elects to conceal the gangrape, a horrific episode that shapes her psychological profile yet remains a secret, dismissed as trivial by the few people to whom she has confided. Thus, she struggles against rather than with her own identity, pretending to be somebody she cannot be. Only in the vindication offered by the cagey admission of Dean Palmer does Ani feel free at last to introduce herself to herself.

It may seem an endlessly recycled cliché, but it is difficult to grow up. Luckiest Girl Alive investigates the impact of a wide variety of pressures that post-Millennial adolescents face. Before the 1951 publication of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the novel Mr. Larson assigns his English course to read, literature dismissed teenage angst as little more than a phase on the way to adulthood. Teenage angst was deemed quaint and trivial and put within the broader context of the supposedly real pressures and real anxieties ahead in adulthood. Indeed, adolescence was seen as a kind of golden age—happy days of innocence and harmless hijinks through which children pass into adulthood. The novel, however, explores the very real difficulties adolescents face in an era now defined by social media and sustained by the Internet. In the novel, the students at Bradley struggle with body shaming and the growing awareness of the power of their physical appearance, the agony of perceiving bodily imperfections, and the dark logic of yo-yo dieting. Ani is particularly aware of what she often calls her “Marilyn Monroe” figure.

Students struggle to find their niche, desperate for the emotional reassurance of belonging in a clique. Ani, a transfer, wrestles with the need for acceptance and dreams of fitting in with the cool kids. The prep school is structured as a forbidding system of ruthless and absolute cliques, within which students in competing groups are mean in ways that can destroy a student’s self-esteem. The gross humiliation of Ben Hunter at the graduation party and the display of Ani’s soiled gym shorts in the student lounge are hardly harmless pranks. In addition, adolescents deal with sexual awakening and the curiosity that it brings. There are no love stories at Bradley, only lurid whispers about messy clandestine sexual encounters. Students weaponize sex using social media platforms to spread rumors and destroy reputations and alienate those who do not fit in, like Arthur and Ben and later drive Mr. Larson out of teaching when a distraught Ani, after Dean hits her, spends the night in his apartment.

Students deal with peer pressure to do reckless things on a dare, and what little Ani remembers about the rape reflects that sort of herd mentality. In addition, the students face their growing discomfort with the authority of their parents and teachers, seeing in such control the threat of destroying their individuality. Fretting over friends, cutting class, figuring out where to sit in the cafeteria, deciding to explore sex—these are not trivial decisions. The two horrific events that shape the narrative from Ani’s adolescence, then, the gangrape and the shootings, are both manifestations of the reality of adolescent angst.