Paulina & Fran by Rachel B. Glaser

Paulina and Fran are struggling with art school. Paulina pretends to be an artist, to her everything is art – maintaining her hair, trying on dead people’s clothes in the thrift store, kissing other people’s boyfriends on the dancefloor at the Colour Club. Fran is an earnest painter, her biggest regret when she dies will be that she never produced enough work for a decent retrospective. The two are slightly lost and somehow find each other, forging an intense and uneasy friendship dancing in the clubs of Norway and inventing Viking lovers in the museums they are dragged around on a college trip.

This is the first novel from Rachel B. Glaser, winner of the McSweeney's Amanda Davis Fiction Award in 2013, and herself a painting graduate. The writing perfectly evokes the pseudo-fashionista attempted cool of the institutional experience – young adults playing with different, often highly ridiculous personas. The first two thirds of the story are filled with addictive engaging prose that immerses the reader in the lives of Paulina and Fran’s characters. Then the book begins to fall down, slightly, as Paulina’s post-school New York anti-adventures unravel throughout a strange and unlikely storyline based around hair products. Glaser seems to have created a poetic final scene and then frantically backfilled, making unrealistic connections between characters who should never have seen each other again. These are all elements which form a slight edge of disappointment on what remains a highly readable book.