“The Girls,” by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada. Their aims are as different as the styles in which they are written. Just like certain sets of more ordinary twins, however, these two books are alike only on the surface. The image of conjoined twins is already so metaphorical, so poetic, that it’s nearly impossible to resist the impulse to read with your metafictional radar set on high, to hover closely over the conceit and attempt to solve the novels as if they were a matching pair of riddles. One wishes, also, to pun and execute clever critical moves: two novels, joined at the hip a pair of books that must be read together, one the secret sharer or doppelgänger of the other better yet, one the slightly asymmetrical reflection of the other two curiosities maybe an allusion to “Persona” and female subjectivity (both novels are written by women, and concern conjoined females) double lives a modern insecurity about identity and so on. One wishes to make some sort of bold, sweeping cultural statement about this phenomenon, that it’s because of George Bush or global warming or gay marriage or late capitalism. As great as the odds are against conjoined, or Siamese, twins being born, they must be greater still against two novels arriving in the same season - or three, if you count DBC Pierre’s “Ludmila’s Broken English,” published in May - that concern the lives and loves of conjoined twins.
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