'Girl Land' lacks facts, Flanagan's humor

GIRL LAND. By Caitlin Flanagan. Little Brown. 209 pages. $26.

Caitlin Flanagan comes to us from a girlhood of hot rollers, half slips and Barbies.

It's an all-white world where persons of color show up only as black men waiting to pounce. Flanagan's own girl land is, she laments, "as distant and unrecoverable as that of the Etruscans."

Maybe that's just as well. Reading "Girl Land," Flanagan's coming-of-age study for contemporary girls, is like eavesdropping on a creepy therapy session.

She's anxious; she's mournful; she's neurotically attached to everything she lost in becoming a woman.

"Girl Land" is more invested in Flanagan's own nostalgia than in this minute's 13-year-old.

As with her first book, "To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife," Flanagan confuses personal grievances with cultural afflictions.

What made "Housewife" fun to read -- Flanagan's sense of humor, her zesty phrasing and her assailable claims -- is missing from "Girl Land."

The assailable claims are here in spades, but Flanagan trots them out in the most mundane way. She often makes these claims as statements of the obvious, as if we all agree that "girls have an overly acute sensitivity to the feelings of others" or "every girl has spent hours factoring romance and boyfriends and sweetly dressed babies into her future" or "a boy does not fetishize the tokens of his childhood."

From its opening sentence -- "Every woman I've known describes her adolescence as the most psychologically intense period of her life" -- "Girl Land" is in retreat from facts and data.

The title is Flanagan's label for a time, adolescent girlhood, rather than a place. Citizens of Flanagan's land are at once "enmeshed in romance" and targeted by anti-romantic forces (crudity, predation, exhibitionism, rap music).

In each of her chapters on dating, menstruation, diaries, sexual initiation and prom, Flanagan stages a conflict between old ways and new ways. It's sentiment on the one side and paranoia on the other.

Flanagan seems most comfortable when she faces the past in archival materials such as dating etiquette books and wedding-night manuals. She's stumped by the present.

"Girl Land" trails off, finally, with a short chapter of advice to parents of girls: ban the Internet, get fathers involved in their daughters' dating life.

Shutting the gates to Girl Land is just another sentimental Flanagan fantasy, as retro as chastity belts and princesses in towers.