5/22/2023 0 Comments Marlena buntinMarlena projects an “air of intensity cut with indifference” she is smart, sexy, adventurous and self-destructive. Yet Marlena appears to Cat, and thus to the reader, not as an object of pity but as a source of wonder. It’s unclear if the journey can be reversed. While Cat’s family flirts with crossing the line into “full-blown” poverty, Marlena’s has already made the crossing. Marlena’s world is shadowed by meth - her father is an addict and her boyfriend cooks - and she spends her time caring for her younger brother, skipping school and scoring Oxy. At the center of the novel looms the dangerously charismatic and dangerously out-of-control Marlena, Cat’s new neighbor. For Cat’s family, much is at stake, psychologically and practically, in living in a “ranch-style modular” instead of a trailer in being hard-up instead of “full-blown poor.”īalanced against this class-attentive realism, though, is something very different: a wild, gorgeous evocation of the wildness gorgeousness of youth. Though “Marlena” isn’t explicitly political, Buntin, herself raised in northern Michigan, is a sensitive observer of such territory, where jobs are hard to come by but drugs and alcohol aren’t, where food stamps both help and humiliate. We’ve heard a lot recently about how writers need to pay more attention to Trump Country.
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