MATASHA
By Pamela Erens
It’s not likely that the lineup of guests appearing on “The Tonight Show” in Pamela Erens’s thoroughly winning novel “Matasha” will mean much to most of its readers, since George Gobel, Cloris Leachman and Truman Capote don’t tend to be household names to today’s 10- to 14-year-old set. Even the novel’s eponymous heroine, an 11-year-old girl growing up in Chicago in the mid-1970s, admits that she has heard of only one of them. The period detail that runs liberally through this book hasn’t been included for memory-lane purposes. It’s here as texture and evidence, helping to fortify the feeling of being Matasha Wax, a sixth grader who sometimes watches Johnny Carson with her family’s housekeeper, and who started reading the newspaper “properly” two years earlier, where she learned all about Patty Hearst and Watergate. She also read “about the South Vietnamese families who were fleeing the country in boats and about the children who had lost their parents on the way. Her mother said she wanted to adopt one. A girl.”
With this book Erens, acclaimed for her intelligent, closely-observed adult novels — including “The Virgins,” about teenagers at a boarding school in 1979 — has made a natural and satisfying shift to middle grade fiction.
To call “Matasha” a character study is to focus on but one of its aspects, though it does limn the character of an idiosyncratic, intellectually minded and appealing only child who is already writing an elaborate novel about a family just before and after the Great Chicago Fire.
Intensity is another of Matasha’s defining features, and it makes her life difficult. She is preoccupied with a 9-year-old Chicago boy, Martin Kimmel, who’s gone missing. And having been “the shortest in her class ever since kindergarten,” she is extremely worried about the possibility of “treatment” if she doesn’t hit 4 feet 5 inches by her half birthday. Not to mention that her closest friend, Jean, is pulling away from her, eventually betraying Matasha with a painful and believable act of childhood cruelty.
But above and beyond delineating character, the novel charts how Matasha tries to figure out her place in the overlapping worlds of school, friendships and family. A dominant story line emerges involving Matasha’s mother, Jenine (another fully realized character): a former “stewardess” and a giver of whimsical parties. “Matasha was aware that people thought her mother was a little eccentric. She’d known this from the minute people had started asking her about her name, which was basically as soon as she knew it herself and could talk. ‘Matasha?’ they asked. ‘Not Natasha?’” At which point Jenine would explain that her favorite novel was “War and Peace.” When the other person started to interrupt, Jenine would say she “liked the sound of ‘Matasha’ better.” Matasha is “proud of her mother for not caring to do what just anybody might do.” Still, it causes “problems.”
Matasha observes her mother as she tries to adopt a child from Vietnam even though her husband, Matasha’s father, isn’t on board; and then, in a dramatic turn of events, as she makes an enormous change in her life that significantly alters Matasha’s and her father’s lives as well.
The many pleasures of this novel include its empathy and poker-faced wit, and the charms of its main character. It’s a shame we can’t read Matasha’s novel; no doubt it too would hold many pleasures.
