The Savage Girl [Paperback]

A bitterly funny broadside on market-driven contemporary life. In Middle City, a firm of marketing gurus-Tomorrow Ltd.-sniff the winds of change for any new trend or desire. Ursula Van Arden meets with co-worker Javier, who's tragically poetic, and with boss Chas, who's imposing ("He doesn't look like other men, he looks like their impossible expectations for themselves"), in a playground where, like the ever-vigilant angels in "Wings of Desire", they compare notes. Ursula is a former struggling artist trying to come to terms with her new life of surface-worshipping fetish-study and probably falling in love with Javier. The savage girl of the title is a homeless, apparently mute, mohawked teenager Ursula spied one day and who has become the inspiration for the latest "trend" Tomorrow Ltd. is pushing: the savage look. Soon, the group has talked a client into using the look to advertise their newest product-diet water-with Ursula's schizophrenic sister as model. Ursula justifies her new career by listening to Javier, "This man who rhapsodizes about bubble pipes and weaves divinity into fishtail hems." Once the savage look is launched, however, a new crisis emerges: it seems that Gen-X irony just isn't working on preadolescent "tween" consumers, and so the agents of change launch themselves into their newest campaign: post-irony. Fortunately realizing that satirizing a world already oversaturated with unreal advertising and target marketing is a tricky deal, first-time novelist Shakar ("City in Love", stories, 1996) pushes his story into the outer edges of fantasy while somehow keeping it rooted in the vicissitudes of the MTV age. The result is a crystalline satire of a preening media elite too exhausted with pillaging the minds of consumers to notice the collapsing world around them. With the crafty-eyed precision of Don DeLillo and the humor of Neal Stephenson, a world where image is life and the Next Big Thing is a mouse-click away. (Kirkus Reviews)

'Shakar's satiric extrapolation of the cannibalistic aspect of our frenzied pursuit of what's hot is searing and brilliant'

'Shakar has a scathing intelligence that transcends the trendiness of any particular moment'

Twins, Ursula and Ivy are both beautiful and ambitious. Ursula becomes a trendspotter in the consumer business, while Ivy becomes a model. But when Ivy can no longer make a living from her body she has a nervous breakdown and is committed to an asylum. There she becomes the "savage girl".

Alex Shakar was born in 1968 in Brooklyn, New York. He is the acclaimed author of the short story collection City in Love: The New York Metamorphoses and lives in Chicago, USA

Chapter One: Stitching

The savage girl kneels on the paving stones of Banister Park, stitching together strips of brown and gray pelt with elliptical motions of her bare arm.

The sleeves and sides of her olive-drab T-shirt are cut out, exposing her flanks and opposed semicircles of sunburned back, like the cauterized stumps of wings. A true redskin, more so than any Indian ever was, her skin more red than brown. It must have been pale once. And her Mohican is whitish blond, her eyes blue or possibly green.

Her pants are from some defunct Eastern European army, laden with pockets, cut off at the knees. Her shins are wrapped in bands of pelt, a short brown fur. Her feet are shod in moccasins.

There is a metal barb about the size of a crochet needle stuck through her earlobe, and a length of slender chain hangs from her scalp, affixed in four places to isolated lockets of hair.

Each time the girl bends forward to make a stitch, her tattered shirt drapes and reveals her breasts, full and pendulous, whereas the rest of her is lean and unyielding. Down the bench, the man with the greased hair and mustache and forty-ounce beer, and his friend, the man with the Afro and mustache and forty-ounce beer, watch the ebb and flow of her flesh with sleepy smiles, lulled by the savage girl's mysterious, eye-of-the-hurricane calm, while around her the rest of the park gyres and caterwauls with trick bikers, hat dancers, oil-can drummers, chinchillas, rats, drunks, kendo fighters, shadowboxers, soccer players, a couple of cardsharpers, and, of course, one trendspotter, Ursula Van Urden, who has been circling the savage girl all morning, moving from bench to bench to get a better view, trying to work up the nerve to speak to her but unable to rid herself of the ridiculous idea that the girl simply won't understand, that she communicates only by means of whistles, cli!
cks of the tongue, or tattoos stamped out on the cobblestones, and that even this rudimentary language she reserves solely for communing with the spirits that toss in the rising steam of hot-dog and pretzel carts.