Towelhead - Vendido!

by Alicia Erian
Simon & Shuster, April 2005
336 pp.

Foreign Rights Sold to:
*** Brasil (Siciliano) ***
UK (Hodder),
Italy (Adelphi),
Israel (IVRIT),
Spain (Random House Mondadori, in a 2-book deal),
Japan (Sony)
Sweden (Modernista)

The year is 1991. When Jasira’s mother finds out what has been going on between her boyfriend and her thirteen-year-old daughter, she has to make a choice -- and chooses to send Jasira off to Houston Texas, to live with her father. A remote disciplinarian prone to explosive rages, Jasira’s father is unable to show his daughter the love she craves -- and far less able to handle her feelings about her changing body.

Bewildered by extremes of parental scrutiny and neglect, Jasira begins to look elsewhere for affection. Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait, and high school has become a lonely place for a "towelhead." When her father meets, and forbids her to see, her boyfriend, it becomes lonelier still. But there is always Mr. Vuoso -- a neighboring army reservist whose son Jasira babysits. Mr. Vuoso, as Jasira discovers, has an extensive collection of Playboy magazines. And he doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with Jasira’s body at all.

Painfully funny, tender, and sexually charged, Towelhead is that rare thing: a gloriously readable novel unafraid to take risks. The story of a girl failed by her parents and by a conflicted America, Towelhead is an ultimately redemptive and moving work that none of us can afford to ignore.

If you’re not yet familiar with Alicia’s work, she’s the author of the acclaimed story collection, The Brutal Language of Love, about which proclaimed Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk says, “This isn’t just a book. This is hilarious, heartbreaking torture.” Pulitzer Award-winner Robert Olen Butler says of TOWELHEAD, “Alicia Erian accomplishes an extraordinarily difficult thing: through the vessel of an adolescent narrator she illuminates a timeless, ageless theme, our inevitable human struggle for selfhood and meaningful connection to others. This is a brilliant first novel.”

Quotes and Reviews:
"Alicia Erian is one of the finest young writers to come along in a decade -- fierce, smart, funny, and wise. And Towelhead is an extraordinary debut novel. It’s sexy, disturbing, joyful and deep, and maybe just a little too real for comfort."
-- Bill Roorbach, author of Big Bend and The Smallest Color

"Alicia Erian’s gripping debut novel fearlessly enters love’s gray areas and darkest corners. The character’s voice casts a slow and subtle spell. Before you know it, you’re convinced the bad guys are good guys and the heroes are villains. I couldn’t put it down."
-- Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter


"Alicia Erian’s unflinching depiction of a teen’s survival is accurate and artful, and it offers a glimpse of true triumph. This marvelous book further confirms Erian as a writer to admire."
-- Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy

"In Towelhead Alicia Erian accomplishes an extraordinarily difficult thing: She illuminates a timeless, ageless theme, our inevitable human struggle for selfhood and meaningful connection to others. This is a brilliant first novel."
-- Robert Olen Butler

PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY
January 24, 2005


Alicia Erian, Towelhead
Simon & Schuster (Apr.)
Short story writer Alicia Erian, 37, finds it easier to thank her agent, Peter Steinberg, in retrospect for pushing her to write a novel than she did at the time it was happening. "I was daunted by the idea of a novel. I didn’t really want to do it," she admits. Nevertheless, she’s happy she tried. "With a story, you write about a group of people and then say goodbye to them. You’re not so involved. With a novel it’s like living in a house with them and being constantly annoyed."
It’s not clear how she could be annoyed with Jasira, the Arab-American 13-year-old who dominates Towelhead as she determinedly explores her awakening sexuality while living in Houston with her strict Lebanese father. "The starting point was that in fiction there seem to be a lot of women who go out with lots of men and we don’t question it," Erian explains. "I wanted the book to be a prelude to that, to provide an explanation for certain appetites. I thought it would be interesting to talk about this when one of the parents is of another culture."
Erian herself grew up with an Egyptian father and a mother of Polish descent, though she says you’d have to go over the book with a magnifying glass to see similarities to her own life. She was influenced by Mary Gaitskill’s story "Secretary," which is about a woman in an unhealthy sexual relationship. "It’s very dark. Gaitskill put her character in a situation that’s bad for her, but the reader is titillated. That’s what good writing should do."
Erian, who teaches creative writing at Wellesley College, says the hardest part of novel writing was learning to relax. "You can’t work too hard. You’re working hard not to work hard. I used to hate the advice that your characters will tell you what to do, but they will. You have to trust your intuition, but who knows if you can until you’ve had some success?" Growing up, Erian says, the only thing she thought she could do was write stories and make her friend Barbara laugh. "We used to have a contest to see who could write the funniest thing." Later, after a story appeared in the Sun, a North Carolina magazine, things started happening. "No one was batting for me. It just took persistence and agitation. There was no need for connections, just hard work and good material. It’s heartening."
—Suzanne Mantell
Sales Tips: Senior editor Marysue Rucci has tracked Erian’s career since she was an underbidder on The Brutal Language of Love, a story collection published by Villard in 2001. She says Towelhead became "smaller" as Erian worked on it, creating something more universal: a clear-eyed rendering of a girl’s sexual awakening. "She could have fallen into caricature and stereotype, but she didn’t. She has a provocative voice that is deceptively simple and Jasira is such a compelling heroine." Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball bought film rights for his feature-film directorial debut. And Barnes & Noble has chosen the book as a 2005 Discover Great New Writers Selection—Summer Season.
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New York Times - Published: March 31, 2005

A Lolita, Dropped in Houston, Learns Lessons of Others’ Prejudice and Her Own Power
By JANET MASLIN

Here are some of the ways that Alicia Erian’s first novel chases attention: It takes its title, "Towelhead," from a flagrant anti-Arab slur. It features a bright-young-thing jacket photograph in which the author does her damnedest to channel the Debra Winger of "Urban Cowboy." And it concentrates on the graphic sexual awakening of a 13-year-old girl. Jasira is a passive-sounding, half-Lebanese Lolita who is provocative enough to leave the males in "Towelhead" wandering through the book in a shared daze.

Since some of them are adult men, Ms. Erian’s ability to extract comic effects from statutory rape is another conspicuous trick. Some readers are sure to miss the lighter side of this aspect. But "Towelhead" is surprising: it succeeds as an arch, coyly sexy book that’s as nervy as its title. And it is screwball-sharp about the many forms of culture shock that shape its story.

"I was afraid to move half the time," Jasira says of her Arab father, Rihat, who takes a none-too-permissive view of her budding sensuality. Her sheer pubescent presence makes him feel obliged to scold her irrationally and constantly: "Once I spilled some juice on one of his foreign rugs, and he told me that I would never find a husband."

The year is 1991, the setting, Houston. The first gulf war looms. Arab-Americans are not popular in Texas, to the point where Rihat keeps complaining that "the Arab perspective" gets short shrift from the American press. But Jasira, whose mother is Irish and lives in Syracuse (eyes glaze over when she mentions this), has been tossed into the midst of this unfriendly climate. The title insult is one of many that come her way.

She was packed off to her father’s place after her mother’s boyfriend took an undue interest in showing Jasira how to use a razor. Ms. Erian is very specific - sometimes to the point of being repetitive and falsely ingenuous - in describing the helpfulness of older men in ushering Jasira through new adventures in eroticism.
So Jasira (whose father wanted to name her Estelle but whose mother insisted on naming her for Yasser Arafat) spends the book fielding both prejudice and porn. While ferreting out the condoms and copies of Playboy that begin to loom large in her fantasy life, she also discovers a confusing tangle of bigotry. First of all, Daddy’s attitude toward women is complicated: though he smacks his daughter for any imagined affront and suspiciously guards her virginity, he allows his brand-new girlfriend to wander around the house half dressed. This girlfriend, Jasira marvels, has "a funny look on her face, like she thought Daddy was nice or interesting."
Then there is her father’s racism: he makes a distinction between North African Arabs and the African-American classmate who becomes Jasira’s boyfriend. He draws no useful lessons from the fact that his own romance with Jasira’s mother attracted similar animosity. And his hostility to this black suitor is so outrageous that he fails to notice problems closer to home. Jasira is also being groped by Mr. Vuoso, the man who hires her as a baby sitter and lives next door.

How does any of this rise above sensationalism? It succeeds in part because Jasira secretly enjoys so much of what is happening to her, and all the new power that it brings. And it works because Ms. Erian turns the tables on her own material, recasting a tale of repeated sexual molestation into a sneaky, improbable comedy of manners. There isn’t a man in "Towelhead" who doesn’t somehow fascinate Jasira - not even the father who eventually gives her a black eye. Faced with the prospect of being sent back to Syracuse, Jasira is happy to lie about her bruises to avoid the even crazier company of her mother.

Ms. Erian, who is also the author of the short-story collection "The Brutal Language of Love," makes "Towelhead" as much a story of family ties as it is a sexual free-for-all. Since nobody in Jasira’s world functions as a truly attentive parent, she is left free to make her own choices about the adults she will admire. The book informally assigns her a stinky kid brother, Zack Vuoso, for whom she supposedly baby-sits while wondering dreamily about Zack’s father, and a pregnant neighbor named Melina who senses that Jasira may be a good candidate for sex education.
The true coming of age here involves not the loss of Jasira’s virginity (which becomes a hopelessly confused point of contention among the story’s men) but the birth of her assertiveness and self-esteem. And this novel’s setting provides more than the usual obstacles to a teenage girl’s search for freedom. The war remains in the background and is sometimes even played for dark comedy. (Jasira’s father and Mr. Vuoso engage in phallic-symbol rivalry over who boasts the more patriotic flagpole.) But of course it colors the book constantly. Even Jasira’s curiosity about Mr. Vuoso’s condom is linked to the fact that she found it in his packed duffel bag. As a reservist, he may at any moment be called away.

"Towelhead" is the kind of book that attaches unusual reflectiveness to that particular echo of war. Jasira is old enough to know that women sometimes have sex with departing soldiers because these men may never return. But she’s too young to know whether, since Mr. Vuoso will not have a combat assignment, he ought to qualify. Ms. Erian gives this gutsy book its full share of such unthinkable questions.
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The New York Times Book Review - April 10, 2005
’Towelhead’: The Young and the Reckless
By JEFF GILES

The idea that it takes a village to raise a child has always struck me not as inspiring but merely inefficient, particularly when you consider how few people it takes to screw one up. A handful of pages into Alicia Erian’s first novel, ’’Towelhead,’’ we learn that the narrator, Jasira, has been ejected from her mother’s house in Syracuse, N.Y., for crimes related to being 13: chiefly, her sudden insistence on having breasts and pubic hair. Jasira’s mother is not a monster. In fact, she might have been willing to overlook her daughter’s conspicuous ripening had her own boyfriend, Barry, been able to overlook it as well.
However, in a sequence that contains much of the DNA of the moving, nervy, bluntly sexual novel that follows, Jasira begs her mother to teach her how to shave because wearing a bathing suit has become traumatic: ’’I told her that the girls in gym class called me Chewbacca, and she said she didn’t know who that was. Barry said he knew who it was and that it wasn’t very nice, but my mother told him that since he didn’t have any kids of his own, he could go ahead and butt out. Then one night, when my mother had parent/teacher conferences, Barry called me into the bathroom. He was standing there in his sweats and a T-shirt, holding a razor and a can of shaving cream. ’Put your bathing suit on,’ he said. ’Let’s figure out how to do this.’ ’’
I say that Erian’s novel is moving because it’s full of images like that one of Jasira, a baffled girl sequestered in a bathroom with a man convinced of his own decency even as he bends down, razor in hand. I say it’s nervy because Jasira kind of likes it.

Shortly after the episode in the bathroom, her mother sends her to live with her Lebanese-born father in Houston, passing the girl off like a hand grenade with the pin already pulled. In Texas, Jasira gets called all kinds of racist epithets. Still, ’’Towelhead’’ is a crass title for Erian’s book, partly because it will nudge the slur closer to ubiquity and partly because the novel isn’t primarily, or even secondarily, about race and politics. As much as anything, Jasira’s being an Arab-American -- at a time when the Persian Gulf war of 1991 plays constantly, like background music, on TV -- seems a metaphor for the annihilating loneliness of being 13. ’’Towelhead’’ nicely captures the rush of sexual stimuli that, especially when coupled with a lack of hard facts, turns an awakening into a fever dream. What the novel really nails, though, is grown-ups: their delusions, their pettiness, the way they sometimes seem, as a class, uniquely unqualified to raise children.

Jasira’s father, Rifat, has a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy on all matters of a bodily nature, and finds himself buying his daughter underwire bras and maxi-pads with a mix of Old World dignity and undisguised repulsion. He believes he’s protecting his daughter’s virtue by, say, refusing to let her wear tampons before she’s married. But Rifat’s values don’t survive contact with the world at large. Soon, Jasira is baby-sitting for the Vuosos next door, playing badminton with the odious, 10-year-old Zack (who ’’kept hitting the birdie into my boobs and laughing’’), while stealing tampons from his mother and poring cathartically over his father’s Playboys. When Mr. Vuoso walks in on one such session, the result is disastrous, not because he’s scandalized but because he’s titillated. Vuoso is 36 and an Army reservist: a screwed-up, if not malevolent, guy camouflaged in the clothes of a dutiful dad. He capitalizes on his newfound power over Jasira instantaneously, saying of the Playboys, ’’Tell me why you like looking at them, and I won’t tell your father.’’ She can’t bring herself to answer, but a day or two later, she blurts it out apropos of nothing, because she craves his attention: ’’They make me have orgasms.’’ Mr. Vuoso arrives at Jasira’s house one night when Rifat is out. The violence that ensues would be considered rape by absolutely anyone, with the possible exception of a 13-year-old girl who confuses any form of contact with affection and even the most terrible knowledge with liberation.

It’s always strange to read a novel narrated by a character who doesn’t understand the implications of her own story. Erian’s prose sounds convincingly like an adolescent’s -- in a good way -- and ’’Towelhead’’ has a darkly comic undertow. (The novel has already been optioned for the movies by Alan Ball, who wrote ’’American Beauty’’ and created ’’Six Feet Under,’’ which should give you a sense of ground the author is tilling here.) Later in the book, though, Jasira’s naïvete begins to grate and the book tilts toward the young-adult genre: ’’Mr. Vuoso wasn’t going to be nice to me anymore. He wasn’t going to be sorry for what he had done. Instead, he wanted me to be sorry for what I had done. Except what he had done was much worse. It didn’t seem fair.’’ Erian, whose previous book was a collection of stories called ’’The Brutal Language of Love,’’ could have given her narrator a more knowing voice: Jasira is telling this tale in the past tense, presumably from a remove of years. In any case, a kind of fatigue sets in, as when, even on a killer vacation, you first contemplate how long it’s going to take to get back.

NONE of the above is a deal breaker because Erian’s gift for conjuring characters is so strong; she has a sophisticated take on people, and charts with real precision how and why the human comedy becomes seriously unfunny. But ’’Towelhead’’ is in no way a downer. Jasira begins dating Thomas, a black classmate whose principles and whose healthy, if somewhat fetishistic, sex drive have a curative effect. And she befriends her neighbor, a pregnant young wife named Melina, who lets her come over and read ’’Changing Bodies, Changing Lives’’ anytime she wants -- and whose zero-tolerance attitude toward Mr. Vuoso is a godsend. Sketched out in these few bare sentences, Thomas and Melina may sound suspiciously like characters in a novel, but, thanks to Erian, I feel sure that I would recognize them on the street.

As for the villains here, Mr. Vuoso may be dangerous but Erian gives him just enough moments of uncalculated kindness that you’re forced to concede he’s human (more or less). And Jasira’s father, Rifat, may seem caricaturish at first glance -- ’’Once I spilled some juice on one of his foreign rugs,’’ she says, ’’and he told me that I would never find a husband’’ -- but you come to feel for him. Despite his selfishness and even his flashes of abusiveness, he’s living out a particularly extreme example of what not a few parents feel in our shape-shifting society, no matter what continent they were born on. He is helpless in the face of Jasira’s needs, her insecurities, her friends, her predators: he’s trying to raise Little Red Riding Hood without ever having seen the woods.
- Jeff Giles is the arts and entertainment editor of Newsweek magazine.
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WASHINGTON POST - April 24, 2005

Growing up as a biracial nymphet in Houston, and other fictional crises of identity.
By Susan Coll

Sticks and Stones

War, statutory rape, child abuse and racism are hardly the stuff of comedy, but in Towelhead (Simon & Schuster, $22), Alicia Erian succeeds in blending this weird and sometimes shocking mix of elements into a funny, poignant and utterly readable first novel. (Her collection of short stories, The Brutal Language of Love , was published in 2001.)

Thirteen-year-old Jasira, of mixed Irish and Lebanese heritage, is smoldering jailbait; she is so naively yet overtly sexual that she tempts nearly every man she meets. Jasira is sent to live with her father in the blasé subdivisions of Houston after her mother’s boyfriend demonstrates a perverse interest in shaving her pubic hair.

Both the humor and the domestic horrors at the heart of this novel are nicely understated, even if the actions depicted are often extreme. Jasira’s father, Rifat, is a cold, abusive, yet strangely empathetic man who is not quite sure what to do with his daughter and her burgeoning womanhood. Although he "doesn’t like bodies," he takes the mortified Jasira shopping for underwire bras and, later, sanitary pads, and asks "Would you describe your situation as light, medium, or heavy?"
Jasira must learn to navigate around her father’s often irrational proclamations. She is taunted both at school and by the boy she babysits with slurs like "towelhead" and "sand nigger," but she is forbidden by her father to see her black boyfriend. North Africans, Rifat insists, are able to check "white" on forms, and he is proud of this ethnic distinction. Largely through dialogue and the first-person voice of Jasira, Erian effectively captures the nuanced motivations of these badly behaving characters without passing judgment; perhaps only an emotionally (if not sexually) innocent girl could convey tender feelings toward the army reservist who crudely seduces her or the father who slaps her around.

These dark narrative strands are complemented by screwball events that include a frozen dead cat as well as the surreal backdrop of the first Gulf War on CNN. Rafit is so absorbed by the war that he buys tray tables from Kmart so that they can eat dinner in front of the television. Jasira notes that this is good: They are seated far enough away from each other that it is hard for her father to hit her. Her observation is droll, but as sobering as the war. "What I learned about Daddy was that it was very hard for him to be nice, so when he was, it would’ve been wrong not to try to appreciate it."
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About the author:

Alicia Erian is the author of a short story collection, The Brutal Language of Love. Her work has appeared in Playboy, Zoetrope, Nerve, The Iowa Review, and other publications. This is her first novel.
crédito da foto: Michele McDonald