Under the Bridge
It may be obvious to many that I have a certain obsession with 1) the social psychology of bullying and 2) crimes perpetrated by adolescent girls, so it should be no surprise to anyone that my most recent read was Under the Bridge, which chronicles the true story of the murder of Reena Virk in Vancouver B.C. Reena was beaten by a large group of teenagers; when they finally let up, two of the teenagers went back to murder her. It was pretty much the kind of stupid-ass impulse-control crime that you'd expect from a teenager with rage issues, much less a gang of teenagers (who amusingly think they are Crips, even though they are resoundingly white and living in Vancouver B.C.). The tragedy is that they were too young to realize the very good reasons a person would want to control those impulses.
I don't typically read true-crime sorts of books, because the majority of them are interested in scandal. My interests in crime tend to be a little more sociologically motivated. This book piqued my interest in part because it was written by Rebecca Godfrey, a relatively young novelist whose book The Torn Skirt I hadn't read, but had heard good things about. I was curious how a fiction writer would put together a book like this, with a number of characters across several years, and a community-scarring crime. It seemed like a fascinating opportunity to go deeply into something very dark and scary and also very human.
But the book disappoints. The prose feels hackneyed and bland, the characterization is shallow, and the book lacks a compass, never delving deep enough in any one direction. I think the main problem with is that it suffers from an identity crisis. The prose risks all the hard-boiled cliches of a true crime book: "If the terrible rumor were true, she would have sunk to the bottom of the Gorge by now." "You'd come up against the horror of death, right there." "It was a strange occupation--looking for something you didn't really want to find." The casual and gritty sound of a voice-over. But where a true crime book will plunge into the brutal details with relish, this book seems to have a different project. Godfrey instead seems to be trying to approach the major characters as characters, with all the empathy fiction can muster. Scenes aren't necessarily depicted as coming through interviews and inference; it's more as if she's trying to create the scene in a fictional universe. She uses attributives like "pleaded," "screamed," "shrieked," and "wept" after quotes she wasn't even present to hear. It may be that this is all carefully assembled from interviews, but the author keeps evidence of her research so invisible that her choice of words assumes an authorial authority she has not established.
Godfrey seems to want to have her cake and eat it too; she wants to have the empathic and humanizing slant of the novelist, but she writes in the rather turgid and uninspired prose of a checkstand novelist. It does not inspire the reader's confidence. The other problem with this approach is that, while it is a noble instinct to want to humanize the perps, you are utterly limited in your ability to truly do this with people you are interviewing. You can't exist in someone's head in reality, you can only try to read them. It's brutally obvious which players she likes, and which players she doesn't like. Some characters are pretty blatantly depicted as selfish brats. While I believe that some people are just selfish brats, it seems a failure of empathy that a novel could get around but that reportage certainly cannot; in a novel you can really make your reader understand where that selfish brat comes from, what it feels like to be them (not "like" them, not "forgive" them...understand them), whereas in journalism you just have to depict people as they are and let it go at that.
The true crime aspect is undercut by the novelistic musings, and the novistic musings never go very deep, are kept on the surface by the bad prose. Which leads me to my other major complaint about this book, the lack of thematic coherence.
You walk a fine line with nonfiction; real life doesn't provide its own theme, and if you want to be true to the events the last thing you want is some heavyhanded tenor. But there has to be a reason for telling this story, beyond "something bad happened." Anyone can tell the story of a bad thing happening. Why did Godfrey want to tell this one? The book is unfocused, sprawling. She refuses to go deep into any sociological or psychological or political musings on the significance. The authorial presence never steps forward. The truly unfortunate part of this problem is that the authorial presence leaks through regardless. Godfrey, in her decisions about how to depict the events, very definitely makes editorial statements. Certain quotes and characters are presented in ways that can only be recognized as ironic. One chapter choppily depicts the opinions of the town adults, whipping through theories that kids don't get enough discipline to "it's the media's fault" to the media's obsession with bullying and "bad girls." Every adult sounds equally clueless. Godfrey comes across as scornful of the readings of the incident the community itself attempted, without positing her own theories or coming forward with her own reading of it.
The point at which the book gets the most interesting is during the trial of Kelly Ellard, near the end. You start to understand what Godfrey's project might be at this point. Ellard, by all accounts the girl to actually drown Virk, consistently claims her innocence. She gets into screaming matches with the lawyer, she is a total brat. By contrast, the other kids in the case, years after the fact, start to own up to their parts. They are all remorseful, sad people, who understand the finality of their actions, because they have had a chance to grow up. It becomes apparent that the reason Godfrey won't delve into the larger mechanics of the murder are that she wants to reclaim these teenagers as individuals and not teenagers. It was neither adolescents nor Adolescence that killed Reena Virk; it was the action of a disturbed and angry individual.
Interesting idea; noble idea. Trying to allow teenagers to be individual human beings and not a scary group or a sociological force or a symbol of our changing society is a worthwhile angle. But the project fails because Godfrey hedges her bets. She refrains from stepping in to say what she thinks, but she still passes judgement on the characters. She indulges in the longstanding tradition of modifier-heavy crime journalism, but then wants us to understand these kids as kids. It just fails.
This is already too long so I'll wind it up; in the end, I would recommend this to anyone interested in particular in this particular crime, but if your interests are more general, I would say you're better off reading Millett's The Basement. It may go too far the other direction sometimes, claiming profound political significance in a sordid crime, but Millett has a much more interesting grasp on what a crime like this actually means.
I don't typically read true-crime sorts of books, because the majority of them are interested in scandal. My interests in crime tend to be a little more sociologically motivated. This book piqued my interest in part because it was written by Rebecca Godfrey, a relatively young novelist whose book The Torn Skirt I hadn't read, but had heard good things about. I was curious how a fiction writer would put together a book like this, with a number of characters across several years, and a community-scarring crime. It seemed like a fascinating opportunity to go deeply into something very dark and scary and also very human.
But the book disappoints. The prose feels hackneyed and bland, the characterization is shallow, and the book lacks a compass, never delving deep enough in any one direction. I think the main problem with is that it suffers from an identity crisis. The prose risks all the hard-boiled cliches of a true crime book: "If the terrible rumor were true, she would have sunk to the bottom of the Gorge by now." "You'd come up against the horror of death, right there." "It was a strange occupation--looking for something you didn't really want to find." The casual and gritty sound of a voice-over. But where a true crime book will plunge into the brutal details with relish, this book seems to have a different project. Godfrey instead seems to be trying to approach the major characters as characters, with all the empathy fiction can muster. Scenes aren't necessarily depicted as coming through interviews and inference; it's more as if she's trying to create the scene in a fictional universe. She uses attributives like "pleaded," "screamed," "shrieked," and "wept" after quotes she wasn't even present to hear. It may be that this is all carefully assembled from interviews, but the author keeps evidence of her research so invisible that her choice of words assumes an authorial authority she has not established.
Godfrey seems to want to have her cake and eat it too; she wants to have the empathic and humanizing slant of the novelist, but she writes in the rather turgid and uninspired prose of a checkstand novelist. It does not inspire the reader's confidence. The other problem with this approach is that, while it is a noble instinct to want to humanize the perps, you are utterly limited in your ability to truly do this with people you are interviewing. You can't exist in someone's head in reality, you can only try to read them. It's brutally obvious which players she likes, and which players she doesn't like. Some characters are pretty blatantly depicted as selfish brats. While I believe that some people are just selfish brats, it seems a failure of empathy that a novel could get around but that reportage certainly cannot; in a novel you can really make your reader understand where that selfish brat comes from, what it feels like to be them (not "like" them, not "forgive" them...understand them), whereas in journalism you just have to depict people as they are and let it go at that.
The true crime aspect is undercut by the novelistic musings, and the novistic musings never go very deep, are kept on the surface by the bad prose. Which leads me to my other major complaint about this book, the lack of thematic coherence.
You walk a fine line with nonfiction; real life doesn't provide its own theme, and if you want to be true to the events the last thing you want is some heavyhanded tenor. But there has to be a reason for telling this story, beyond "something bad happened." Anyone can tell the story of a bad thing happening. Why did Godfrey want to tell this one? The book is unfocused, sprawling. She refuses to go deep into any sociological or psychological or political musings on the significance. The authorial presence never steps forward. The truly unfortunate part of this problem is that the authorial presence leaks through regardless. Godfrey, in her decisions about how to depict the events, very definitely makes editorial statements. Certain quotes and characters are presented in ways that can only be recognized as ironic. One chapter choppily depicts the opinions of the town adults, whipping through theories that kids don't get enough discipline to "it's the media's fault" to the media's obsession with bullying and "bad girls." Every adult sounds equally clueless. Godfrey comes across as scornful of the readings of the incident the community itself attempted, without positing her own theories or coming forward with her own reading of it.
The point at which the book gets the most interesting is during the trial of Kelly Ellard, near the end. You start to understand what Godfrey's project might be at this point. Ellard, by all accounts the girl to actually drown Virk, consistently claims her innocence. She gets into screaming matches with the lawyer, she is a total brat. By contrast, the other kids in the case, years after the fact, start to own up to their parts. They are all remorseful, sad people, who understand the finality of their actions, because they have had a chance to grow up. It becomes apparent that the reason Godfrey won't delve into the larger mechanics of the murder are that she wants to reclaim these teenagers as individuals and not teenagers. It was neither adolescents nor Adolescence that killed Reena Virk; it was the action of a disturbed and angry individual.
Interesting idea; noble idea. Trying to allow teenagers to be individual human beings and not a scary group or a sociological force or a symbol of our changing society is a worthwhile angle. But the project fails because Godfrey hedges her bets. She refrains from stepping in to say what she thinks, but she still passes judgement on the characters. She indulges in the longstanding tradition of modifier-heavy crime journalism, but then wants us to understand these kids as kids. It just fails.
This is already too long so I'll wind it up; in the end, I would recommend this to anyone interested in particular in this particular crime, but if your interests are more general, I would say you're better off reading Millett's The Basement. It may go too far the other direction sometimes, claiming profound political significance in a sordid crime, but Millett has a much more interesting grasp on what a crime like this actually means.