By Tom Nolan
FROM: lareviewofbooks.org

The mercurial nature and tenuous persistence over decades of the friendship between two young women, Verna and Jolene, raised in the 1960s in the same rural town in Utah, and their problematic love, at different times, for the same gifted, emotionally isolated man, Vincent, are the threads tying together Judith Freeman’s bracing, engrossing, tough, and tender new novel, MacArthur Park, much of which is set in Los Angeles from 1984 into the present century.

Verna, a late-blooming writer and the narrator of this socially conscious and personally revelatory document, is from a traditional family of modest means; her father sold shoes for a living. Jolene’s adulterous parents were rich: the family manufactured firearms (provoking guilt in the intellectually precocious girl). While adventurous Jolene went to college after high school, conservative Verna stayed home and married a cowboy named Leon. She was happy enough, she thought, until, after 20 years, her husband decided that he’d prefer to be hitched to an ex-rodeo queen. “I told him it was bad enough for a husband to walk out just when you were starting to lose your looks,” Verna writes, “but to leave me for a woman named Pinky? C’mon, I said. That’s the low blow.”

In truth, she feels that “the day Leon left I was freer than I’d ever imagined I’d be.” And in that freedom, she remembers Jolene: her teenage best friend, now an artist of growing repute living two states west, in Los Angeles. Back then, Jolene was a rebel, flouting rules, saying and doing outrageous things. She assured Verna: “We can be anything we want to be. […] We don’t have to be like our parents.” Jolene “had the power to make me feel she was much smarter than I was,” Verna says. “That she had some kind of deeper understanding of the world.” She “produced these sorts of feelings and sensations in me that I simply didn’t know what to do with. […] [U]nder her influence I experienced a sea change in behavior” — smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, testing the boundaries and proprieties of her community.

“But when Jolene was especially reckless during a trip to Verna’s aunt’s farm — starting to strike a match in the combustible haybarn — the woman chewed her out in the harshest terms, later telling Verna: “Something’s wrong with that girl. […] I don’t think she’s right in the head.” The girls’ friendship petered out. Shortly after, Verna married, and Jolene went east.”

Now, in 1984, faced with another sea change, the 37-year-old Verna contacts Jolene in Los Angeles, asking whether she can stay with her until she finds her own social niche and begins her own “adult” life. A startled Jolene says okay: “You always had guts.” But she warns Verna:

“L.A.’s a strange place. […] [I]t’s a very weird city and it takes a long time to feel — I can’t even say to feel at home. […] [I]t takes money to live here. […] It’s a city of cliques and castes and celebrity. […] It can be a really lonely place if you don’t have friends. […] You are where you live — I mean the neighborhood you live in determines a lot[.] […] And the good neighborhoods are so fucking expensive. […] But far be it from me to discourage you.” Read Rest of Review Here