Within the 2020s, love triangles are all the fashion—no less than in American literature. The final 5 years have seen a proliferation of novels about non-traditional triads. Raven Leilani arguably ignited the development with Luster, adopted by Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Child, Julia Might Jonas’s Vladimir, and Jen Beagin’s Large Swiss, amongst others. Every novel featured a feminine protagonist armed with a sardonic voice, and every used a love triangle to probe social points associated to intercourse, energy, race, gender, and sophistication.
The Girl Ready: A Novel, Magdalena Zyzak, Riverhead Books, 352 pp., $28, Might 2024.
Largely, these novels have been about American lust. However a brand new addition to the checklist, The Girl Ready by Polish novelist and filmmaker Magdalena Zyzak, gives a world spin on the style. This mischievously pleasant caper facilities on the love triangle between a rich American couple and their Polish assistant, who conspire to steal a Vermeer.
Though Zyzak, like her predecessors, is within the dynamics of intercourse and energy, she throws a brand new ingredient into the combo: globalization. The Girl Ready is, beneath the intercourse, a narrative of the worldwide economic system, the place employees from international locations on the periphery do many of the labor for a tiny slice of the pie, whereas traders from the core economies feast.
The Girl Ready is the second novel by Zyzak, who was born in Poland however has lived in the USA since she was an undergraduate within the early 2000s. Zyzak writes in caffeinated English: On the spectrum of foreign-born writers who switched to English, she is much nearer to Vladimir Nabokov than Joseph Conrad—she by no means passes up an opportunity at puns, chiasmus, or phrase play.
The novel opens when a 23-year-old Polish immigrant, Viva, spots a complicated lady in a inexperienced cocktail costume standing on an island of Los Angeles’s 101 freeway. Viva stops to supply a trip to the girl, who seems to be a wealthy Polish-American named Bobby. Quickly, Bobby and her husband, Sleeper, a retired U.S. movie director, provide Viva a job. They need her to be their live-in assist. “Sleeper says our family wants a spouse,” Bobby explains.
Viva has been in the USA for a yr and is floundering, going unhired due to her faltering English and her failure to soak up American social norms. (When an interviewer asks what her best weak spot is, Viva solutions, “manipulating”; she doesn’t get the job.) Viva by no means wished to come back to the nation within the first place. However a boyfriend satisfied her to enter the inexperienced card lottery; when she gained, everybody instructed her she’d be loopy to not money within the ticket. In Poland, she has a “instructing diploma, although nothing to show”; in America, the one job she will get is as a house help for an older lady who quickly dies.
Viva’s causes for being in the USA crystallize when she meets Bobby, who strikes her because the form of lady you see on Los Angeles billboards. Bobby is wealthy and comfy being wealthy. She charms Viva at an costly lunch in Beverly Hills. The waiter brings out rosé and sharing plates, and Bobby says, in characteristically gleeful free affiliation, “Individuals hate rosé however I find it irresistible … Doesn’t offer you as a lot of a headache, so long as it’s a quickie, not an affair. By no means date a socialist except he’s the champagne form. Oh, hey, socialism! We’re going to share all of the plates!”
Viva is intoxicated not simply by Bobby’s cash but additionally her command of English. When Viva speaks, she is hobbled by her adopted tongue; in Viva’s narration, although, her inside monologue sounds form of like Bobby’s dialogue. Explaining her origins, Viva narrates: “The person who had impregnated my mom in a rapeseed area—not a metaphor, a significant Polish crop—had ridden a motorbike.”
After lunch, Bobby takes Viva to an costly boutique, the place she steals a $9,000 costume for her. Viva is distraught—she might lose her inexperienced card if she’s an confederate to against the law.
“Why did you steal it?” Viva asks.
“As a result of I might afford it,” Bobby says with a shrug.
The costume seems to be a harbinger. Bobby convinces Viva to steal—or fake-steal, in a transfer that she claims is “impartial legally”—a Vermeer that went lacking from a museum 9 years earlier, from her ex-husband, a Russian mobster. The fictional Vermeer, “The Girl Ready,” is a small portrait of a girl seated in entrance of a window, gazing at her palms. The ex-husband just lately acquired it as compensation for a debt, and he’s trying to return it to a German museum that’s providing a ten million euro reward.
Her ex is outsourcing the job as a result of it could be tough for a Russian on the Magnitsky checklist to assert the reward. In the event that they succeed, the Russian ex will get the vast majority of the ten million, paying out 1,000,000 every to his German lawyer in addition to the Individuals—Bobby and Sleeper. In a mirroring of globalization, Viva, the laborer introduced in to do the precise work and assume the precise threat, will get just one %. However 100,000 euros is a life-changing quantity for Viva. It would purchase her a ticket on the elusive route from immigrant to expat.
As for the love triangle, Viva sleeps first with Bobby, who excites her in context if not motion. (“It was not the method however the scenario—that she was my boss—that aroused me.”) Sleeper excites her in a way more easy means: “It was outstanding that different males had by no means made me come, as a result of the entire thing had taken lower than two minutes.” It’s Bobby who pushes her to Sleeper—every of them is aware of of Viva’s involvement with the opposite—and each time Viva sleeps with Sleeper, it appears to convey him nearer to Bobby. She begins to fall for Sleeper, but additionally for Bobby, in a complicated means: “Generally I such as you a lot I need to be you,” she tells the latter.
Sleeper and Bobby are idle wealthy. They dwell like “nineteenth-century aristocrats,” working little and ingesting usually, in fixed pursuit of drollness. Viva is paid $1,000 every week for an unwritten and ranging set of duties that features making breakfast, bringing ice to cocktail hour within the sizzling tub, breaking in Bobby’s sneakers, and, implicitly, intercourse. She is alternately ignored, fawned over, spoiled, and humiliated. “Was their habits an abuse of energy if that energy was the very factor that turned me on?” she wonders.
By Bobby, she will get a style of American opulence. When she tries on Bobby’s costly boots, she feels a “need to personal them that was akin to lust or starvation.”
“Poor women from Poland, Russia, Ukraine in my technology had little to no inoculation towards luxurious merchandise, communism having worn out most hereditary wealth,” Viva says. “We’d kill for a pair of designer sneakers.” When Viva later climaxes with Sleeper, she fantasizes that she is Bobby, surrounded by designer sneakers.
The plot to retrieve the portray goes easily, however—spoilers forward—after Viva brings it again, it’s stolen from Bobby’s closet. Viva, Bobby, and Sleeper journey to Venice to search out the Vermeer, all of the whereas being tailed by a Russian mafia thug. Overseas, their affair turns extra overt, and Viva begins sleeping with the couple collectively. At one level, she catches Bobby watching her have intercourse with Sleeper. Viva later tells Bobby that she needs to be the one spectating. Bobby replies, “do you actually assume I care to know what’s in your chicken mind? That is my fantasy. Mine, not yours.”
That is when Viva begins to appreciate, if she hadn’t already, that she is on the bottom rung of this ladder, and if she needs cash, energy, or selection, she’ll have to interrupt out of the system. She tracks the now thrice-stolen Vermeer to a mining city in Poland, the place she buys it from an outdated girl storing it in her automobile for somewhat greater than $1,000. The girl lives in a communist housing bloc the place, “in an apathetic nod to individualism, every dice was painted a unique, pale underwear shade: gray-white, uninteresting purple, brown-pink, lint blue.” When Viva talks to the girl, she notices in her mouth “a niche from a lacking canine, a tiny black door to the imply world I’d escaped, a world the place you’re lowered, one indignation at a time, by low-cost dentists, costly clergymen, needy dad and mom, treacherous youngsters.”
Viva’s emigration isn’t straightforward for the Individuals within the novel to grasp. She didn’t go away Poland to pursue a dream: “The place I’m from, fantasies are typically about revenge, not aspiration.” Neither is she, as a pal of Bobby’s assumes, fleeing “some hellhole the place males raped sheep and ladies gave beginning in ditches.” Poland, which acceded to the European Union in 2004, is one thing of a improvement success story, and it’s usually seen by its neighbors to the east as a land of prosperity and alternative. However alternative is relative.
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah, a Nigerian émigré says of the white folks in his adopted nation:
they might not perceive the necessity to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They might not perceive why folks like him, who had been raised effectively fed and watered however mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from beginning to look in the direction of elsewhere, eternally satisfied that actual lives occurred in that elsewhere, had been now resolved to do harmful issues, unlawful issues, in order to depart, none of them ravenous, or raped, or from burned villages, however merely hungry for selection.
Viva ambivalently left the “shabby consolation” of dwelling for alternative. However as soon as she’s walked within the sneakers of her U.S. employers’ mix of boundless optimism and reckless shortsightedness, she will’t return. She swipes the portray, cuts off contact with Bobby and Sleeper, travels to Berlin, will get her personal German lawyer, and claims the reward. The consequence of her actions shortly turns into clear when she sees that Interpol has declared Bobby and Sleeper lacking, final seen in Russia.
In the actual world, it could possible be the employee who bore the consequence of a scheme gone sideways. However Zyzak’s world is extra simply than ours, in a way, whereas nonetheless adhering to the hierarchy. Right here it’s the rich American traders who should reply for his or her actions and Viva who claims their spot because the aspirational wealthy.
Towards the top of the story, Viva’s German lawyer recommends that she hand over her inexperienced card and settle in a tax haven such because the Cayman Islands to maintain extra of her reward cash.
“I believe I need to maintain my inexperienced card,” she says.
“Might I ask why?” the lawyer asks.
“As a result of,” Viva says, “I gained it within the lottery.”
Viva could also be a millionaire now. However extra importantly, she’s an American.
