The year is 1930 and the country has slid into the Great Depression. Fifteen-year-old Thea Atwell has been ejected from her family home in Florida for doing something very, very bad. Her punishment: to be remanded to the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. A child of privilege, Thea has grown up in near isolation on a citrus plantation, with her twin brother, Sam, and 16-year-old cousin, Georgie, as her closest companions. Once deposited and uniformed, Thea comes to realize that Yonahlossee isn’t just an elite summer camp but a year-round school and — cue “Hotel California” — she’s not going anywhere for a long time.
This is the promising opening of Anton DiSclafani’s ambitious first novel, which positions a world of horseback riding, romance and Southern snobbery against the backdrop of the country’s worst economic trial. It’s not an easy pairing, imagining girls in polished riding boots sneaking liquor and enjoying liaisons while people in surrounding Appalachia struggle just to find enough to eat. As DiSclafani writes, the school is “an island of rich girls in the middle of the poorest.” Not only that, there are girls at Yonahlossee “who refused to believe or at least admit that the North had claimed victory in the War Between the States.”
One has to respect DiSclafani’s enterprise, even if her efforts fall flat. A former equestrian competitor, she is best when describing equine pedagogy, the minutiae of tack and hoof care, the talk of fetlocks and forelocks, leading her readers to understand why teenage girls can be so enthralled with horses: they require care but also serve as empowerment symbols, providing a shield against fear as well as a socially sanctioned metaphorical outlet for sexual urges. Unfortunately, there’s just so much of this you can handle if you’re not a teenage girl and crazy about horses.
Thea only gradually lets the reader in on all the details of her terrible secret. This coyness prevents us from getting to know and like her, and it makes DiSclafani’s attempts to create drama feel contrived. Throw in the distant mother who has banished Thea, the isolated childhood, the girls in their all-white uniforms and the underlying suggestion of incest and taboo, and everything gets very “Flowers in the Attic.” A further hindrance is DiSclafani’s not always careful prose, as when Thea describes the joy of riding her horse fast on a moonlit night: “I could do this forever, was how I felt; and what else is there to say about galloping?”
While some of DiSclafani’s descriptions of teenage sexuality seem credible, most are either awkward or too vivid for their particular context. At one point, Thea fantasizes about her friend Sissy and Sissy’s secret paramour, Boone: “I thought of Boone gently and urgently kneading her breasts.” Which sounds to me like a bad mammogram, a really bad third date or instructions for how to make gnocchi.
The good news is that the novel finally achieves some forward motion in its muddied final laps, heroically unscrambling a host of plot lines. In the course of all this, Thea will engage in more bad behavior, without exhibiting any remorse or sense of conflict, rendering her even less likable. “I had wanted something very badly,” she calmly explains, “and then I had gotten it, and the getting kept getting better.” She sounds like a middle-aged madam rather than the independent young woman DiSclafani presumably intended.
The book is a cinematic, image-heavy exercise: DiSclafani presents us with luscious visuals like the Yonahlossee girls riding in their radiant uniforms under the tutelage of their German riding coach — or taking silent baths in a room filled with nothing but steamy tubs, each girl in her own tub, servant at the ready with clean white towels. You can practically see the trailer for the Sofia Coppola movie.
There’s a saying in the horse world, often grumbled by parents whose bank accounts have been emptied by the sport’s high cost but who are relieved by the knowledge that their teenage daughters are more obsessed with horses than they are with boys: Horseback riding is the world’s most expensive form of birth control. Apparently, Thea Atwell never got the memo.
Alex Kuczynski is the author of “Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery.”
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