{"id":57621,"date":"2013-08-09T15:58:04","date_gmt":"2013-08-09T19:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=57621"},"modified":"2013-08-12T10:32:18","modified_gmt":"2013-08-12T14:32:18","slug":"emma-clines-marion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/08\/09\/emma-clines-marion\/","title":{"rendered":"Emma Cline\u2019s \u201cMarion\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"800px-CALIFORNIA-ROCKY_POINT_-_NARA_-_543248\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the first three years that I edited The Paris Review<\/em>\u2014a reader pointed out last spring\u2014we never published a short story from a child\u2019s point of view. This wasn\u2019t a matter of principle. I just like stories in which the narrator knows as much as possible. I like to see a writer stretch to represent a consciousness as big, as clued-in, as grown-up as the reader\u2019s own mind. What\u2019s called dramatic irony\u2014where the writer and reader sort of conspire together over the narrator\u2019s head\u2014doesn\u2019t interest me. Except every once in a while, when it does.<\/p>\n

From the first sentence of \u201cMarion\u201d\u2014\u201cCars the color of melons and tangerines sizzled in cul-de-sac driveways\u201d\u2014Emma Cline takes us inside the thoughts of an eleven-year-old girl who does not always understand the adults around her, or the sexual desires of her older best friend, but who intensely feels their heat. The language is so vivid, Cline registers her confusion so exactly, that she creates the same confusion in the reader. Part of us knows what\u2019s going on between these girls, part of us is lost and needs the story to take us by the hand. Which it brilliantly does, as you will hear in this excerpt read by Cline herself.<\/p>\n