“We are thirteen, almost fourteen, and the streets of Sea Cliff belong to us.” Eulabee and her friends Maria Fabiola, Faith and Julia rule this chic San Francisco neighborhood, which, on rare haze-free days, offers breathtaking views of the Golden Gate Bridge. The gang attends a private girls’ school, dresses in Esprit and Guess, is enthusiastic about Breakfast Club, knows every nook and cranny of the cliffs of Baker Beach and China Beach by heart, and attracts more and more attention from the boys.
Until the sagacious Eulabee is excluded from the group for not having supported the mythomania of the beautiful Maria Fabiola, who tells everyone that a man masturbated in a car while asking them the time. Having become an outcast, she must fend for herself (“a lunch without friends takes forever”) in the middle of a community where lies and discomfort abound.
Figure of the trendy American literary scene – she founded and for a long time directed the magazine The Believer –, Vendela Vida succeeds with Tame the waves a wonderful novel about adolescence, between Bret Easton Ellis for the very referenced evocation of the 1980s, Sofia Coppola for the spleen of young girls, and the film Clueless for the sarcastic look at these privileged schoolgirls. A native of San Francisco where she still lives with her husband, the writer Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida also captures this particular period of the city, after the counterculture of grubby hippies, but before the billions of tech moguls.
Tame the waves, by Vendela Vida, translated from the American by Marguerite Capelle. Albin Michel, 287 p., €21.90.