Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl offers readers an unconventional reading experience, an allusive and multivalent work that plays with form and style to a degree that shouldn’t come off. That is does is a result of her expressive power and the fluency of her writing.

Narrated by an omnipresent narrator through the experiences and emotions of a pretty, young American girl living and working in a series of menial jobs in London, Zambreno’s central themes are youth, beauty, and alienation. But this perceptive study of intensities does double-time as an exploration of character-creation and the creative process. The influence of modern experimentalists such as Jean Rhys is evident, as is the novel’s prefiguration of what Chris Kraus terms lonely-girl phenomenology.

My impression from reading Kate Zambreno’s Heroines and Green Girl is of a writer fully engaged with tackling the event of modernism, who is establishing a powerful and exciting body of work. I am mad keen to read more.