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WORK TITLE: The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: San Francisco
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married.
EDUCATION:Emerson College, B.F.A.; Oxford University, M.St.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Originally from Lexington, Massachusetts, Jana Casale writes contemporary fiction. Her debut novel, The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky, is a look at the complexities and joys of a millennial woman charting a course of her life. Casale earned a bachelor’s degree from Emerson College in Boston, and a master’s degree from Oxford University. She lives with her husband in San Francisco.
Casale’s protagonist in her 2018 The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky is Leda, a woman with her perfect life planned out—become a famous writer, find love, plant a garden, read Noam Chomsky. Yet those plans slam into reality and the slow march of years. In short-story-like chapters, Leda recounts her days eating alone in her college apartment, having a disastrous one-night stand, marrying her husband, reluctantly moving cross country with him for his job, having a daughter, and buying a Noam Chomsky book but never reading it. In her old age, she tries to start a garden. Eventually she comes to realize that the best-laid plans of her youth were not the only means to fulfillment and contentment. A writer in Kirkus Reviews, which named the book one of “11 Debuts You Need to Pay Attention To,” called the book profound and beautiful, for example, “the depictions of Leda’s connections to both her mother and her daughter are filled with love and warmth. This is so rare in contemporary fiction, it’s almost hard to believe.”
Critics likened the book to the works of Virginia Woolf, Rona Jaffe, Maggie Shipstead, and Sheila Heti. “Casale’s clear-eyed examination of a woman’s life is done with abundant humor,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly who praised Casale for an elegant and sharply drawn debut. Addressing Casale’s use of an omniscient narrator, Claire Hopley in Washington Times remarked: “The effect collapses the usual timescale of the novel that traces a character’s life. Instead of several decades, we have a constant present that emphasizes the figures in the carpet, the continuity of feeling and affect that mark lived experience.”
Commenting on how society expects women to carry more burdens during life than men, Casale said in an article by Adrienne Westenfeld in Elle: “They’re looked at as not the same. They’re not respected. My book is about a woman who’s dealing with things she shouldn’t have to because of how she was born. I hope this book makes women feel less lonely.” Although Leda never gets to read that Noam Chomsky book, there are “thousands of things she does, thinks, reads, and writes, which Casale relays with a careful, assured, and light touch,” Annie Bostrom observed in Booklist.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2018, Annie Bostrom, review of The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky, p. 50.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2018, review of The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky.
Publishers Weekly, February 5, 2018, review of The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky, p. 38.
ONLINE
Elle, https://www.elle.com/ (April 18, 2018), Adrienne Westenfeld, review of The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky.
Washington Times Online, https://www.washingtontimes.com/ (April 19, 2018), Claire Hopley, review of The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky.
Jana Casale has a BFA in fiction from Emerson College and an MSt in creative writing from Oxford. Originally from Lexington, Massachusetts, she currently resides in San Francisco with her fiancé and two cats.
Jana Casale is a breakout author, with her debut novel, “The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky,” being heralded as a daring and honest look at womanhood. Casale has a B.F.A. in fiction from Emerson College and an M.St. in creative writing from Oxford. Originally from Lexington, Massachusetts, she currently resides in San Francisco with her husband.
JANA CASALE has a BFA in fiction from Emerson College and an MSt in creative writing from Oxford. Originally from Lexington, Massachusetts, she currently resides in San Francisco with her husband. The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky is her first novel.
Casale, Jana: THE GIRL WHO NEVER READ NOAM CHOMSKY
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Casale, Jana THE GIRL WHO NEVER READ NOAM CHOMSKY Knopf (Adult Fiction) $26.95 4, 17 ISBN: 978-1-5247-3199-1
The interior life of a millennial Everywoman as she matures over the decades.
Prepare to fall in love with Leda, the wickedly relatable protagonist of Casale's funny, insightful, and deeply adorable debut. When we first meet her, she's a college student studying writing in Boston, dealing with her annoying friendships with women, her unsatisfying encounters with men, and the loneliness and self-doubt at the heart of it all. As she moves through life, we see all her experiences from both the outside and the inside. For example, in a coffee shop exchange with her friend Elle about their future plans, Elle announces that, as far as she's concerned, it's time for the fantasy of becoming a writer to end. She just wants to set "realistic goals," she says. "Leda recognized the familiar wave of cruelty and cattiness that lingered in the comment, a rich but common display of the unabashed hatred and simultaneous press for superiority any woman could feel for another woman at any given moment." Soon after this meeting with her ultraslender friend, Leda decides to join a gym. "As she walked past all the men and their weights, she looked back at the women running and biking and stepping. Keep running ladies, she thought. You'll never get away." Much later in life she's in a dressing room, miserably trying on bathing suits. She has told the obnoxious salesgirl several times that her name is Leda, but the woman insists on calling her Lisa, shouting, " 'Lisa, how are the sizes working for you?' 'Fine.' I'll kill you, Karen. I'll kill you right now, so help me god." We follow Leda as she drifts away from her commitment to writing and toward her first serious relationship, relocating quite unhappily for her partner's career. One of the most moving and original parts of the book is when Leda becomes a mother and we can see how much her attitudes toward herself and other people have matured by the way she raises her own child. In fact, the depictions of Leda's connections to both her mother and her daughter are filled with love and warmth. This is so rare in contemporary fiction, it's almost hard to believe. But just as importantly, will she ever get around to reading Noam Chomsky?
So much fun, so smart, and ultimately profound and beautiful.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Casale, Jana: THE GIRL WHO NEVER READ NOAM CHOMSKY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534375275/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f4b6ed1c. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534375275
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky
Annie Bostrom
Booklist. 114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p50+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky. By Jana Casale. Apr. 2018.368p. Knopf, $26.95 (9781524731991).
Readers meet Leda, the "girl" at the steady center of Casales sharp debut, during her college years and spend the rest of the novel, which is also the rest of Leda's life, getting to know her. Inspired by the, no doubt, impeccable taste of an intriguing but surly coffee-shop stranger, young Leda buys a copy of Noam Chomsky's Problems of Knowledge and Freedom. She'll keep it forever, through decades and moves and weedings of her ever-growing book collection, but won't ever know much about it beyond that it smells good. But for this one book Leda never reads, there are thousands of things she does, thinks, reads, and writes, which Casale relays with a careful, assured, and light touch--each one veritably thrilling in its ordinariness. Leda falls in real love and abandons a writing MFA program to follow that love across the country. She marries, has a daughter, works, and wonders if she's a writer after all. God help her: she tries on swimsuits. In episodic chapters, Casales perceptions about womanhood and seamless style make for pure reading joy. By her story's end, Leda is, and isn't, the same girl we met all those pages and years ago. And isn't that just right?--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 50+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956860/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b23f30c5. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956860
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky
Publishers Weekly. 265.6 (Feb. 5, 2018): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Girl Who Never Read
Noam Chomsky
Jana Casale. Knopf, $26.95 (368p)
ISBN 978-1-5247-3199-1
Casale's elegant, sharply drawn debut follows Leda, a girl whose myriad goals--to read Noam Chomsky, to be "linear," to find love, to be a writer, to plant a garden--chafe against inevitable compromise and "oppressively real" life. In short story-like episodes, Casale explores the signal moments of Leda's life: a bad one-night stand; giving up grad school in Boston to move to California with her boyfriend, John; marrying and having a baby girl, Annabelle; seeing her daughter's first school play. Casale's clear-eyed examination of a woman's life is done with abundant humor--a swimsuit mishap in a department store fitting room is a laugh-out-loud gem--and aching melancholy: "Life could be so unreal and so vivid all at once you'd think it was a dream," Casale writes of an inconsolable Leda after the death of her mother. "She would search for her mom forever everywhere she would go." As a youngster, Leda believes the "first innate truth of her womanhood" is that one must "never be fat." The last innate truth, she finds, is that "womanhood is loneliness." In between, readers will be captivated by Leda's life. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky." Publishers Weekly, 5 Feb. 2018, p. 38. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526810357/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d6ac3d5d. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526810357
Jana Casale's New Novel Explores a Life Less Fulfilled
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky asks the big questions.
By Adrienne Westenfeld
Apr 18, 2018
Elena Seibert
If you’ve got an eye on the book world, chances are you’ve heard about the problem of relatability. On one side, some readers argue that characters need to be relatable to be compelling. On the flip side, others claim that only reading about lives like one’s own is limiting and problematic.
Meet Leda, who defies both arguments. The titular protagonist of Jana Casale’s The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky is an everywoman built for the twenty-first century. We meet Leda as an undergraduate writing student in Boston, where she longs to make it as a fiction writer, to be thinner, to fall in love. As college-age Leda suffers through bad sex, resents her sometimes-friends, and waffles on her gym membership, Casale makes a particular female experience vivid, centered, seen.
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Constructed from episodic slices of life, the novel sees Leda through the Hallmark milestones of her life—marriage, parenthood, bereavement—but also through the quotidian slog of her days, through children’s tantrums and trash television binges. The disarming wit and granular detail of these vignettes feels intensely personal, drawn from the lively mind of a unique character, yet universally recognizable.
“We don’t pay a lot of attention to the little things, yet through them, there’s so much opportunity to show how people are feeling,” Casale told me over the phone from San Francisco. “All of humanity can be shrunken down to those tiny moments, because everything we do is an example of who we are. In a way, those moments can be more interesting than bigger-picture ideas, because they’re more of what we deal with and more where we see ourselves.”
Take, for example, one of the book’s most incisive scenes. A middle-aged Leda, shopping for a bathing suit, takes stock of her aging figure: “She was disgusting, fat, worthless. How dare you even live.” When she gets stuck in a swimsuit and has to be freed by the infuriatingly cheerful saleswoman, she strikes an all too familiar bargain: “She promised herself all kinds of things about eating salad and going for walks in the evening…. She felt like crying and she felt like screaming…. Her whole life and the fat pinching and hating her stomach.” It's a familiar, scalding cocktail of shame and self-loathing.
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“It’s really sad that we have essentially half the population walking around with these insecurities about the vessel of who they are,” Casale said. “That’s a common issue with women—across the board, we’re made to feel like our lives are lesser, less important, less serious, less sad or hard. It’s devastating that this is the way it is."
As Leda ages, we see her youthful ambitions clash with the disappointments and compromises of adult womanhood. Her graduate school plans are put on hold when she relocates to support her boyfriend’s career; her dream of becoming a master gardener is dashed by her own black thumb. It’s not a spoiler to say that she never gets around to Noam Chomsky, either. Casale is deeply invested in asking unanswerable questions about shaping a life of meaning, particularly as that challenge relates to gender and “having it all.”
“Leda doesn’t get to go towards her dreams and be a writer; she doesn’t fulfill that goal,” Casale said. “But she’s still a happy person. Most people don’t follow the path or dream they had as a kid. Does that mean you’re not living a happy life? No. Is your life fulfilled? That’s the question. I’m always wondering and thinking about what we’re doing versus what we want to do. And what that means for us in our personhood, especially as it relates to women.”
Late in her life, Leda remarks, “The fundamental condition of womanhood is loneliness.” The novel brims with similar gems, each of them asking us to consider a woman’s interior life. “The space and the freedom that men must have inside their minds is just so different from what women experience,” Casale said. “Women get a very early sense of burden in having to carry so many different loads. Each one affects how you perceive yourself and how you attack the world. All these little things add up, and I just thought: That’s a very lonely way to live. Leda and her husband can connect in many ways, but not this one. He got to live a life very free of those burdens, and she did not.”
"Most people don’t follow the path or dream they had as a kid. Does that mean you’re not living a happy life?"
Despite the societal constrictions placed on her, Leda’s life on the page is striking in that it's a life, just as it’s lived. Casale finds beauty and profundity in the ordinary trials and joys of womanhood. What’s so feminist about this novel is the assertion that the entirety of a woman’s existence, in all its splendor and struggle and minutiae, matters. This one life is worth reading about; it's enough.
“We have a lot of people who aren’t being treated equally,” Casale said. “They’re looked at as not the same. They’re not respected. My book is about a woman who’s dealing with things she shouldn’t have to because of how she was born. I hope this book makes women feel less lonely. That’s the goal, more than anything else.”
A love of linearity, with time that is not
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By Claire Hopley - - Thursday, April 19, 2018
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
THE GIRL WHO NEVER READ NOAM CHOMSKY
By Jana Casale
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95, 368 pages
In the very first sentence, Leda, the girl in the title of Jana Casale’s debut novel, says “I’d like to read Noam Chomsky.” But this idea is but one impulse among the many that throng Leda’s mind “scattering like any and all moments of her life.”
We meet her as a writing student in Boston, and sit on her shoulder as she assesses guys in classes and coffee shops; has girls’ nights out on dateless Saturday evenings; suffers as her stories are picked apart in workshops; observes other passengers on public transport; calls her mom, who always assures her that she’s a great writer.
In a way, Leda doesn’t doubt it, but she spends most of her time considering her linearity — slimness being a major ambition — and confiding in her friends Anne and Elle.
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Her story is packed with tiny details. She wears a scarlet coat. On a cold day she clasps a mesmerizingly warm hot chocolate, only to spill it and soak her gloves. She orders “just” a Cobb salad and “just” water when lunching with Elle only because that’s what Elle is having and she doesn’t want to fall behind in the linearity stakes.
If you are over about 23, this sort of trivial stuff can have you rolling your eyes, but it is the meat of “The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky.” All that detail, the record of a thousand minor things weaves and piles and cleaves together in a vivid image of life.
Eventually Leda meets John in a class and falls for him because she spots his kindness. When he gets a job with Google, Leda foregoes graduate school to go to California with him. Ideal! She can write all day, can’t she? It turns out she can’t. They return to Massachusetts, marry, buy a house and have a daughter.
Though Leda ages as she becomes a bride-to-be then a mom, the torrent of questions and impressions and memories never ends. Indeed, it loops around, tracking backward, fast-forwarding. For example, as a student she fantasizes about becoming a lawyer and wearing a pencil skirt.
“I’d look good in a pencil skirt,” she thought. Years later she’d order one from Nordstrom, but when she tried it on she thought it made her look hippy. It didn’t, not at all. She looked long and lean in it, and when she pulled her hair back, standing sideways looking at her reflection in the mirror, she looked maybe the most beautiful she had ever looked.
Despite her intention of sending it right back, she’d neglect to return it and would find it months later buried in a hall closet, creased in a plastic bag. She’d donate it to charity. “It’s brand new. Somebody should get some use out of it,” she’d say as she handed it over.
When did this pencil skirt thing happen? The idea was planted by a conversation with Elle when they were students, but it is a much older Leda who buys it and hands it over, unworn, to a charity. The elapse of time is not really relevant however. The pencil skirt is timeless, a permanent element in Leda’s life.
Ms. Casale’s narrator quite often zips through time in this way. The effect can be disconcerting. For example, after being praised by her writing teacher “Six months and two weeks of Leda’s life were unrecognizably calm. She found a certain focus in herself that would only be revisited the summer her granddaughter was born.”
How can the narrator know this? Leda is our contemporary. She hangs out in Boston’s students’ cafes. She catches up with people on her cell phone. So how can we know about her grandchildren? Or even about the fact that she married and had a baby? Or about several other referenced events that must occur in the 2040s and ‘50s if Leda is one of today’s Boston students?
Of course, the answer is that the narrator is omniscient and can give us information about Leda’s future. The effect collapses the usual timescale of the novel that traces a character’s life. Instead of several decades, we have a constant present that emphasizes the figures in the carpet, the continuity of feeling and affect that mark lived experience.
Jana Casale has several writerly talents, among them sharp eyes for detail, sharp ears for speech and a witty turn of phrase. But her deft control of time is extraordinary, and makes her first novel exciting as well as fun. Who could not love the girl who never read Noam Chomsky, though she long owned a copy of his work, always planned to look into it, but at some point in the future chucks it out?
• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.