Review: Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol

Anya's Ghost - Vera Bosgol (w/a)
First Second, $15.99, ISBN: 978-1-59643-552-0

Typically, young adult books are barely distinguishable from children's literature. They are instructive, moral, cautionary and inclusive — young people don’t want to feel estrangement, say the writers and editors, shoving comforting, distracting garbage down young throats like sour medicine — “this is what's good for you!” These “insiders” (as author and critic Thomas Ligotti would label them) abound in the teen realm, creating entertainments of rebellion and angst, only to have these sparks of self-aware individuality — outisderism — quashed in the final act. Think of any teen narrative and how its drama and resolution are concerned solely with the protagonist’s integration with society at large. Outsiders, on the other hand, can articulate the dread of finding one’s sense of self to be a fraudulent display and fiercely rage against falling into line with the orthodoxy of society.

How refreshing then to find that in Vera Brosgol’s Anya’s Ghost we find the markings of a true outsider spirit. In her teenage heroine, Brosgol creates a self-cipher —a Russian-American torn between the traditional, old-world values of her mother and the competitive popularity of the private high school she is forced to attend. The Orthodox of her family religion and the literal uniformity of the school are clear indicators of what the author is driving at here. Of course, Anya does not fit in to either world: she’s too modern for her mother’s ways (she’s into Glasgow indie music for crying out loud) and too foreign to fit in at school. Her only friend is the curiously androgynous Siobhan, and the two spend most of their time together skipping PE class and smoking.

Like many outsiders, Brosgol is drawn to the macabre, and how fitting that the eponymous spectre is a manifestation of the horrors of conformity. Upon falling, Alice-like, down a disused well, Anya meets Emily — the ghost of a young girl who had been thrown down there and left to die. Emily attaches herself to Anya and becomes the doting best friend she never had, who helps her cheat on tests and get closer to the cute boy on the basketball team. For a while, we’re tossed into a John Hughes world (complete with montage) of unlikely friends and the inevitable rise to popularity of the outcast. So used to the formula are we that it may be tempting to close the book half-way through, since the ending seems so certain. But, thankfully, Brosgol is too cynical to let that happen.

Once Emily has helped Anya to become a picture of conformity, rejecting her old friend and finally becoming accepted by her peers, we realize that all is not what it seems. Gradually the veneer is peeled back and Anya sees people for who they actually are — the insiders only pretend to be happy in order to maintain their place in society, and the further inside she gets, the more she wants out.

Anya’s move towards homogeny is revealed to be the source of Emily’s power — she feeds on Anya’s acceptance and approval — and the once-benevolent spirit grows ever more corporeal and malicious, forcing her to comply with a reductive, idealist picture of adolescence. When Anya refuses, the ghost soon starts endangering her family and we too share in the horror of obedience.

That Anya wins out in the end, and the fact we have a semblance of a happy ending may be seen as a victory for the insiders, but a closer look reveals a much darker hue to the book’s resolution. With Emily cast back into her well, Anya has the hole filled under the pretense of public safety — congratulated on this initiative by her school principal, she gives him her full, Russian name and clearly marks her territory outside of mainstream American society. The closure of the well itself is a significant gesture towards the abjection of conformist trappings.

With Emily disposed of, Anya is reunited with Siobhan, but it is a bittersweet reunion. She declines Siobhan’s offer of a cigarette because she doesn’t feel like smoking anymore. That’s a kicker. In casting-off this affectation, she’s also rejecting her friend, after all, not only are cigarettes simply a capitalist signifier of rebellion, but by also characterizing Siobhan with this oral fixation, Brosgol shows her as an insider in her own way; dependent and immature. In the end, Anya has rejected everyone — between alienation and conformity, she chooses to be an outsider.

It took Tolstoy the greater part of his career to realize his place as an outsider, that Brosgol achieves it so early is a startling achievement. The fact that she chooses to make comics for young adults gives them a genuine voice to relate to. While insiders will take joy in the cool, easy line of her art, the outsiders will bask in the reflective gaze of its abyss.

-- Gavin Lees

Posted in: Gavin Lees,Review