I just finished reading ‘The Falconer’, Dana Czapnik’s debut novel and I loved it. Salman Rushdie has been a supporter of Czapnik and it shows in her splendid prose that immerses one in 1990’s New York City.
It’s the story of 17-year old Lucy Adler, a self proclaimed ‘pizza-bagel’ (half Jewish, half Italian). It’s written in the first person as we follow Lucy in her senior year in the private school where she doesn’t fit in at all. “But I’m a girl, and I’m really tall and I don’t have Pantene-commercial hair and I’m not, let’s say, une petite fleur, so everyone just assumes I’m a lesbian.”
We first meet her on the basketball court – she is an outstanding player – with her childhood friend and crush, Percy. Through his references to French nihilism and the moral bankruptcy of his banker father, we quickly glean that Percy is an aspiring existentialist determined to disavow his upper-class roots. Lucy turns a blind eye to Percy’s hypocrisy, his escapades with other more “womanly” women, his desire to go to San Diego upon graduation since, according to him, the girls there are “the way they should be,” and his strange bouts of jealousy as she secretly negotiates her ability to be both boy-obsessed and a tomboy. It is via the prism of her relationship with Percy that Lucy begins to forge her way through and against the current of normative gender roles.
Lucy loves her basketball and the descriptions of the game are some of the best I’ve read. Czapnik’s descriptions of the New York of the 90s are captivating and fun to read.
Lucy’s coming-of-age is tempered by her constant brush-ups against the constrictions society places on her sex. Happening upon “The Falconer,” a bronze of a boy in Elizabethan dress releasing a falcon in Central Park, Lucy is envious that statues of boys depict them in action poses while women are either demure nudes or Alice in Wonderland. “Don’t you wish they made statues of girls like that?” Lucy asks Alexis. “Just some girl having unapologetic fun.” Alexis replies: “I never apologize for the fun I have. And neither do you.” Reader, beware: Spending time with Lucy is unapologetic fun, and heartbreak, and awe as well.
‘The Falconer’ is a New York Times ‘Editor’s Choice’. I loved it and I think you will too. Give it a try.
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