Douglas Trevor: Girls I Know (A Novel)

October 2, 2013 by David
Filed under Fiction, WritersCast

978-0983150534 – Sixoneseven Books – paperback – May 1, 2013 – $15.95 (ebook versions available at lower prices)

A debut novel set in Boston, Girls I Know has an unusual narrative structure that sometimes feels like a love song to the city of Boston as much as a novel about the protagonist, tortured failed graduate student, Walt Steadman. Walt is a classic nebbish – dropped out of graduate school writing a thesis on an obscure poetic subject, making his living now as a sperm donor and doing odd jobs.

Walt is painfully obsessive – as a way to channel his feelings of failure and indirection. He goes to the same small coffee shop for breakfast almost every day, where he befriends the owners and their daughter, Mercedes. He loves Boston in an obsessive way too. The real story of the novel begins when Walt is survives a terrible shooting at his favorite restaurant which leaves four people dead, including his friends.

Now he is forced to confront himself and in his recovery, try to find the self he has buried in his self indulgent lifestyle. The girls he knows are both complicated – the effervescent Ginger Newton, Harvard undergraduate – another obsessive, but a much more active one, she is writing a book called Girls I Know about women and their jobs and the heartbroken and speechless Mercedes, whose parents are now dead. How he interacts with these two “girls” on his path to self discovery and redemption are what this book is really about.

I liked this book much more than I initially thought I would (coming of age stories are not usually my forte as a reader). Trevor is a very good storyteller, and his characters are all interesting and well drawn. And his Boston comes to life throughout the book. Trevor knows his way around characters and places and his writing is strong. His collection of short fiction, The Thin Tear In The Fabric Of Space, won the Iowa Short Fiction award in 2005. Author website here. Kudos to this independent publisher, Sixoneseven, for doing an excellent production job and a serious effort to market and promote a very good book.