Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
Wednesday, June 10, 2020 at 6:47AM
TChris in General Fiction, Jean Kyoung Frazier

Published by Doubleday on June 9, 2020

Jane’s father was an alcoholic. Here’s the view of life he shared with Jane: “I think some people are just born broken. I think about life as one big Laundromat and some people just have one little bag to do — it’ll only take them a quick cycle to get through — but others, they have bags and bags of it, and it’s just so much that it’s overwhelming to even think about starting. Is there even enough laundry detergent to get everything clean?” Before he died, he also told Jane that he thought people would be happier if they lived alone on an island. It might not be surprising that Jane has some issues.

Jane is eighteen and pregnant, working as a pizza delivery girl who has no skills or education and no ambition to acquire any. Most nights, she sits in the shed where her father used to drink and has a few beers, pregnancy notwithstanding. She lives with her Korean mother and her boyfriend but she no longer lets them into her life, much to their distress. Jane doesn’t understand why she’s pushing away the people who love her but she’s clearly on a bad path. The novel’s drama comes from the reader’s fear that her path, like her father’s, will take her to a destination she will never be able to leave.

Jane used to love her boyfriend. She used to leave work and feel that, “for at least half an hour after, everything, every last thing, was too beautiful to bear.” Something has caused that to change. The precipitating event might be her pregnancy, but the defining cause of her current misery, apart from unhappy memories of her father, is unclear to Jane and thus to the reader.

The story is dark but it has a number of light moments. It begins when a woman in her late thirties orders a pizza. Jenny wants a pizza with pickles because her family recently moved to LA and her autistic son will only eat pizza with pickles. He’s having a meltdown because she can’t find one (adding pickles after the pizza is baked doesn’t cut it for him). Jane takes the order and is persuaded to buy a jar of pickles. After the cook prepares the pizza, she delivers it to a grateful Jenny, with whom Jane instantly bonds. Jane later babysits for Jenny’s child and discovers that Jenny has issues of her own, making Jane feel an even stronger bond and an attraction that might be sexual. Whether Jenny feels the same way is, at least for a moment, ambiguous.

It isn’t quite clear why Jane needs to cling to Jenny. Jane says she likes Jenny because Jenny listens to Jane, makes her feel that her life and opinions matter, but so does Jane’s boyfriend. Why Jane becomes obsessed with Jenny is a question to which the novel offers no satisfactory answer. Again, that might be a product of Jane not really understanding herself — a common enough affliction at her age.

Jane’s obsession leads to a dramatic but strange moment at the end that might best be described as Jane hitting bottom. What follows might be regarded as a happy ending if only because, having hit bottom, there is nowhere for Jane to go but up.

I enjoyed Pizza Girl largely because Jane is curious and observant. Despite her woes, she isn’t entirely self-absorbed. She envies a husband and wife who seem joyously attached to each other until she learns that the husband is abusing the wife. A church support group is attended by people more interested in judgment or self-pity than support. Her new friend Jenny seems happy but she’s trapped inside a head that is filled with thoughts and memories she can’t ignore. Jane’s boyfriend is falling apart, largely because Jane has withdrawn her attention from him. Her mother seems to be distant but is actually quite caring. The collateral characters work so well that ambiguities in Jane’s characterization are easy to overlook.

Jean Kyoung Frazier writes sharp and honest dialog, She makes it easy to sympathize with Jane and to hope that she will make better choices. The upbeat ending suggests that she will. I sometimes feel that endings of that nature are manipulative or hokey, but Frazier sold me on this one, and on the story as a whole.

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