West Farragut Avenue

To begin with, this first-person narrative seems to be about romance, love, and yearning for the deceased. The protagonist remembers Shrimp – her first great love, meant to last a lifetime – while simultaneously telling the story of his death and its impact on a group of twenty-year-old friends. Jelonek describes the experience of multiple initiations: entering a relationship and the wider world, as well as confronting the myth of America. All these experiences are strong, cranked up and lived with a vivid intensity arising from her youthful sense of invincibility.

Her recollections of Shrimp soon turn out to serve as a vehicle for recounting the tricks played by memory: their summer spent together in the USA had felt like the most important experience of her life, and she seemed to remember every second, still unable to get away from her memories years later. But memory plays tricks; while promising to take note of everything, it is strongly selective and creates alternative courses of events. From time to time, the forty-year-old protagonist addresses Shrimp – the ever-young, immortalised boyfriend – and tries to piece things together, examine the blanks and settle accounts with herself.

The protagonist’s continual battle with grief, her attempts to cut herself off from her youthful experiences and her inability to accept the passing of time as a middle-aged woman turn out to be at the heart of West Farragut Avenue. This wonderfully crafted story, both intimate and thematically rich, drunkenly hypnotic yet chiselled, is a painfully rational distillate of memory.