By Jack Callil
FICTION
A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing
Jessie Tu
Allen & Unwin, $29.99
Jena Lin loves sex. On the first page, she’s banging a bassoon player at a funeral in a closet. It’s a quick, "pity" screw interrupted by Tchaikovsky on the speakers, signalling their cue to perform for the bereaved. Most of the time for Jena, sex is just sex. Though as Jessie Tu unravels in her debut novel, sex can mean many things: agency, power, or being desired; punishment, a distraction, or a salve to being alone.
Jena casts a solitary figure. An eminent violinist in Sydney, she was once a globally renowned child prodigy set for stardom until a public breakdown at age 15. Now 22, she is back at the violin, auditioning alongside a close friend for a permanent role in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Jena’s life consists of obsessive practice, a small coterie of friends, and an absence left by her adolescent success. But when she is awarded an internship to the New York Philharmonic, she sees an opportunity to return to the limelight, to once again command the attention of her childhood: "Like glory. Heat. Entirely mine."
In lieu of this fame, Jena seeks out men, though to say sex is merely a respite to her "insatiable hunger" for attention would be simplistic. It is partially the case – "The boys saved me," as Jena says. "They taught me I was good" – but Tu also uses Jena’s sexual appetite as a means of articulating female desire outside the male gaze. Throughout the book, Jena sleeps with a variety of men who lay "claim" to her. She ultimately transcends them, claiming that everything she does with men is "an ode" to herself.
She is a character who subverts norms, wiling away hours watching violent porn in between YouTube performances of Beethoven and Shostakovich violin concertos. Selfish, motivated, duplicitous, curious, brilliant: Jena is unapologetically complex.
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Amid Jena’s sexual exploits, Tu deftly plays with the reader’s interpretations of her agency. Jena sleeps repeatedly with Mark – a middle-aged, sexist, racist high-baller with a girlfriend – and during sex she thinks, "I don’t even ask if I’m enjoying it, I just move my body". Is Jena subservient, disengaged, or is sex a performance – a way of exerting control?
Tu never lands on a singular answer, offering instead a panoptic view of a woman whose self is one of "various faces and shapes". Between Jena the respected violinist and Jena the sex addict, we never see her clearly. Tu is at her strongest here, exploring the contradictions and subtleties of human nature, desire, and identity.
It is a shame, then, that Jena’s complexity is undermined in the latter half of A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing. Throughout the plot, which gradually weakens and fails to land, Tu tackles myriad themes and issues: Australia’s issues with race, the sexualisation of women musicians, the white homogeneity, racism and sexism of the music industry.
They are serious issues warranting interrogation, and at times they bolster the narrative, but mostly they are shoehorned in with only a tentative relation to the story. It breaks the immersion, not giving pause for thought but distracting from the nuance with which Jena Lin is constructed.
Despite these faults, however, this is still an engaging and notable debut. Tu’s writing is piercing, with a staccato tone offering chiaroscuro-like sections of intensity and quiet. While minimal, Tu’s descriptions of Jena’s unknowable, "gracious state of being" at the violin are also visceral – undoubtedly informed by Tu’s 15 years of classical training as a violinist. Similarly, Jena’s sexual intricacy is presumably shaped by Tu’s own experience in sex therapy, which she writes about in an essay for Primer.
The result is an absorbing, occasionally confronting and often captivating first novel. In Jena Lin, Jessie Tu has crafted a memorable character – and we hope for more.
Jack Callil is digital editor of Australian Book Review. Twitter: @Jack_Callil
This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund and the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas