A Facile, Feel-Good Tale of Tangled Relationships

GIRL FROM THE SOUTH

A Novel

By Joanna Trollope

Viking

304 pages, $24.95

“Chick flick” is the term, often used pejoratively, to describe those films that attract a predominantly female audience. Typically told from a woman’s perspective, these films tend to highlight relationships over plot-driven action, use either internal monologues or heart-to-heart conversations to reveal motivations and portray character development and often include some kind of tear-inducing scene as a cathartic release. Certain books follow this same model. Joanna Trollope’s “Girl From the South” treads this feminine territory with a degree of lyricism, energetic writing and sharp imagery. However, the novel doesn’t address the deepest complexities at the heart of human relationships.

Gillon Stokes is the title’s girl from the South, a nearly 30-year-old woman in Charleston, S.C., who works as an art museum intern but can’t quite make the leap to a full-fledged career in art conservation. She hasn’t found the perfect man to settle down with and watches as her younger sister Ashley effortlessly meets all the Southern expectations of feminine roles: a husband, a home, a baby on the way. Gillon can meet none of these and isn’t sure she wants to. Ready for a change in scenery and urged by her boss to explore new opportunities, she prepares for a job in London with a small firm specializing in the conservation of Italian Renaissance paintings.

Meanwhile, Tilly and Henry, a couple on the far side of the Atlantic, are stalled out in their relationship. Tilly wants Henry to propose but Henry isn’t ready for that kind of commitment. Their lives are populated with equally unrooted friends. The comparison makes for a tidy juxtaposition: Gillon’s clannish family and Southern life on one hand, the rootlessness of urban London on the other. Enter Gillon on the London scene, and the heart-to-heart talks about relationships, the tears-held-back scenes and the soul-searching take off.

The plot revolves around questions of relationship: Will Tilly succeed in getting Henry to marry her? Will Gillon find a man or career of her own? Will Ashley overthrow the expectations placed on her or succumb to them? Will Gillon and Tilly heal the childhood wounds that still constrain each of them?

“I’m a woman,” Gillon’s mother, Martha, says at one point, “ ... and women don’t, as a rule, identify themselves primarily by what they do, what their career is. That’s very satisfactory, a career, to a lot of women, but women measure themselves by their relationships, they identify themselves that way.” This is an interesting comment from a woman who’s shunned expectations to become a psychiatrist and has put career goals above familial roles, but British author Trollope (“Next of Kin”) doesn’t address that discrepancy, nor the undercurrents running beneath these issues.

Though the writing is strong, the story is predictable. From the moment we meet each character, none of whom are eccentric or terribly unusual, we can see how and why they are stalled in their lives. We watch as they untangle life lessons, employing therapy-speak to help each other through as they come into their own as mature individuals.

“Sometimes, we can only feel a sense of place ... from the outside,” Gillon is told before taking off for London. “It’s not your fault. It’s not Mama’s fault. It’s not my fault. It’s the tension ... between being an individual and being part of a collective,” Gillon advises Ashley when postpartum depression hits.

That thoughtful, deep novels of true artistic merit can be written about women and their relationships was proven most recently by Mona Simpson’s “Off Keck Road.” Not much happens in the way of extreme plot occurrences; rather, the book limns the quiet lives of friends and family members getting older and staying put, but in doing so, plumbs the intricacies of human relationships.

In comparison, “Girl From the South” is perfect beach reading, offering feel-good-about-yourself platitudes, abundant character anguish over the guy that got away and comforting plot resolutions. It’s the consummate chick flick for the page.