Current Reading The Lightness by Emily Temple

 

I am currently reading Emily Temple's new novel, The Lightness. The publisher summarizes the novel as follows:

One year ago, the person Olivia adores most in the world, her father, left home for a meditation retreat in the mountains and never returned. Yearning to make sense of his shocking departure and to escape her overbearing mother—a woman as grounded as her father is mercurial—Olivia runs away from home and retraces his path to a place known as the Levitation Center.

Once there, she enrolls in their summer program for troubled teens, which Olivia refers to as “Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls”. Soon, she finds herself drawn into the company of a close-knit trio of girls determined to transcend their circumstances, by any means necessary. Led by the elusive and beautiful Serena, and her aloof, secretive acolytes, Janet and Laurel, the girls decide this is the summer they will finally achieve enlightenment—and learn to levitate, to defy the weight of their bodies, to experience ultimate lightness. 

Personally, I enjoy the book. It is a bit ethereal and surreal, and it will not go down as my favorite book of the year, but I am glad to read it.

 The times says this of the book:

It’s a teen thriller in the vein of the ’90s horror movie “The Craft,” only instead of a Los Angeles high school this one is set at what Olivia calls “Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls.” But it’s also a beautiful meditation on meditation, with readings of sacred texts and light Buddhist history, populated with girls who refuse to act the way they’re expected to; who have too much passion, too many feelings and nowhere to put them; who are on the cusp of adulthood, “waking up to the true nature of things,” fragile as they are smart and naïve as they are reckless. They yearn to know how they can shape their own reality even as they’re learning (as Olivia imagines her father would say) that “reality is a construct, consciousness an illusion.” Friendships, too, prove to be illusions, as that between the girls fractures and frays, exposing the aching need at the center of each individual’s ambitions. This book — frequently hilarious, and thoughtful throughout — also transcends expectations at its end.

The Guardian says this:

Where The Lightness does carry weight is in its scenes away from the mountain and its manic pixie dream friends, as we watch Olivia’s family disintegrate: her artist mother who creates voluptuous sculptures of women out of steel; her aloof father who wears blue tinted contacts over his blue eyes for extra dazzle. It’s here that Temple shows us why Olivia might yearn to be untethered. 

It is hard to shake the lurking sense – the hope – that The Lightness might reveal itself to be a sublimely subversive satire; a much-needed parody of our abiding literary fetishisation of girlhood, with all of its idolatrous hunger and coiled sensuality, or perhaps a scabrous caricature of pumpkin spice spirituality. Temple’s description of the mountaintop centre, with its grab bag of courses from iridology to tantric sex, has promising raw-toothed bite. “I’ve come to be suspicious of American practitioners of Eastern philosophies,” grown-up Olivia confides. “There’s something so rapacious about them ... All that performative kindness. All that practised calm.”

Bethanne Patrick in the Post compares the novel to Donna Tarrt's The Secret History (one of my favorite books of recent years, by the way). However, she,unfortunately, finds the book lacking.

The plot she’s chosen remains melodramatic, however: Hormone-drunk adolescents fall for something part-spiritual, part-magical, and go too far — way, way too far. The four friends constantly touch and stroke and lounge on one another in what might be a realistic view of young female sexuality if it weren’t combined with all their scheming and manipulation to have Luke teach them the secrets of levitation, as well as a body-heating technique known as “tummo.” When Olivia’s attraction to Luke grows, but she finds out he is tending someone else’s garden, she begins to see her friends as rivals instead of companions.

All will be revealed, which readers know because an adult Olivia is narrating this tale with years of hindsight and more than a little ruefulness. “Does this constant tracing and retracing make me less the witness, or more?” she wonders. “I mean, I have to do something, even after all this time.” After going over the events of that summer again and again, she has learned, supposedly the hard way, that believing too much in any one thing can break your heart. That lesson doesn’t amount to much for the reader, though, despite all the promise of Temple’s immense talent.