Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
“It seemed as if there was nothing more uncomfortable that I could say. They could support a teenage pregnancy, but not this, not a person who drifted from one moment to the next without any idea of where she was headed.”
Jean Kyoung Frazier’s debut novel, Pizza Girl, opens with the promise of a modern bildungsroman. Our unnamed narrator is a Korean-American eighteen-year-old, pregnant, young woman unmoored from the reality of her situation. She lost her father. She is living with her baby-daddy and mother who are both ecstatic about the pregnancy. She avoids thoughts of the future, and increasingly detaches herself from those who care about her.
Frazier captures the aimlessness of a generation disillusioned by lack of opportunity, rising cost of living, and increasing social barriers in her narrator. As she struggles with reconciling herself with her pregnancy, her relationship with her deceased alcoholic father, and her obsession with Jenny, the reader glimpses the dark, and often sad life of the pizza girl.
“There’s a place I used to go when I felt lonely and small...when you’re in a people-packed space and there’s not a single face that looks at you for longer than a second — it’s not invisibility, it’s worse, they see you, they just have already decided in that second that there’s nothing about you worth knowing, that kind of small.”
I wanted the pizza girl to be a character I rooted for and liked, but in the end she was not. I loved this description of her alienation, and Frazier’s wordsmithing is gifted. She is unapologetic in her depiction of the narrator’s struggles, but her choices never were understandable for me. I was hoping for some of the magical quality of All the Ugly and Wonderful Things. That book was ugly and wonderful. I picked it up thinking it was going to rehash the Lolita narrative of an adult man in love with a young girl-child, but it was so much more. The story woven by Greenwood allows the reader to feel the deep tragedy of Wavy's life and the redemption that comes with her relationship with Kellen. There was a sweet quality to the love story that defies all societal norms. I wanted that feeling from Pizza Girl, but there was no sense of self-awareness or rethinking of priorities for the narrator who continues her reckless behavior right up until the end.
A bright spot for me was the character Billy. He could have remained a flat, stereotypical, All-American popular kid who got a girl pregnant, but Frazier offered us glimpses into something more. Billy eschews his athletic gifts in favor of intelligence. He values family, and shows a depth of care for the pizza girl that she cannot show herself. The scene in the bathroom with the gun was a watershed moment of reading. His loneliness, feelings of self-doubt, and anxiety over a world he sees as broken were what I was waiting for. I wish Frazier had spent more time in these moments. The characters had the potential of telling the immigrant story, the abuse survivor story, the overcoming obstacles story, the broken American Dream story, but they just felt unfulfilled.
Pizza Girl offers sparks of complete brilliance. The lack of naming for the narrator until the very end allows Frazier to tell a story that could be about anyone, and at the same time everyone. The feelings of invisibility all the characters experience at points in the novel are resonant with our current national conversation, as well as our personal struggles with isolation during the pandemic. I have seen this work described as funny and zany, but for me, it was incredibly sad. There is an element of sardonic humor, but it does not leven the weight of the self-destructive trajectory the narrator speeds headlong towards. Frazier delivers a complicated view of humanity in the metaphor of an unexpected pizza topping that embodies all of the salty, fermented, hard-edged experiences of trying to find your pace in the world. Her voice will be one to watch.
Pizza Girl
by Jean Kyoung Frazier
2020. 208 pages
About Carrie Honaker
Carrie Honaker is a writer currently based in Panama City Beach, Florida. She is a voracious reader and kitchen sorcery addict who found her inner writer at the Blue Ridge Writing Project in 2010. Most days you can find her plowing through a book, writing or dabbling with a new recipe. Currently, she is working on a memoir encompassing themes of motherhood, food, and loss interspersed with family recipes. You can find her on Twitter: @writeonhonaker, Instagram: @corkdorkva, and on her blog Strawbabies and Chocolate Beer.
