Graffiti Girls, by Elissa Soave review: 'feminism lite'

Although driven by a recognition of the reality of everyday sexism, Graffiti Girls eventually begins to seem more like a 21st century fairytale than a story rooted in real lives, writes Joyce McMillan

Elissa Soave’s Graffiti Girls is a novel set in Hamilton. That’s Hamilton, Lanarkshire, rather than one of its many namesakes around the world; and Soave’s story is set there not so that she can explore the raw miseries of post-industrial economic failure, but so that her characters can celebrate the life of a town they love, and - in at least one case - consider to be among the most beautiful in Scotland.

If this powerful affection for an underappreciated home town is one of the book’s most striking features, though, it is also pretty marginal to the story Soave tells, which could unfold almost anywhere in 21st century Britain, or beyond. Full of explicitly feminist content, but nonetheless recounted in the breathless, adjective-heavy style of a Mills & Boon romance, the Graffiti Girls tells the tale of four middle-class women in their early forties who briefly embrace their long-suppressed feminist rage, and succeed in transforming their own lives for the better, while really changing very little in the society around them.

Elissa Soave | Contributed

The women themselves are described at length, in the kind of detail beloved of romantic novelists everywhere. Carole is the pretty one, with blonde hair, dimples, and super-slim waist, married to wealthy and handsome Dennis, and the mother of four sons. Lenore is a childless schoolteacher and perpetual dieter, in recovery after being dumped by her husband for a younger model.

Susan is a librarian, single mother to a teenage son, and blessed with a shock of curly red hair; Amy is the gay one, a crop-haired female plumber wrestling with the sexist attitudes she constantly encounters from customers. All four have been friends since their schooldays; and after one particularly bruising encounter, angry Amy suggests that it’s time to stop talking, and take some action against the myriad examples of everyday sexism they encounter, both at work and at home.

So are born the Graffiti Girls, an anonymous team of black-clad night-time graffiti artists who take to adorning local buildings with roughly-painted feminist slogans, from Women Are Not Here To Serve You to No Means No. They quickly become the talk of the town; and while no-one knows who they are, the women themselves soon find their lives beginning to change for the better, as they shake off the mid-life roles society has bestowed on them, and discover a new sense of power and agency.

Soave is an effective, page-turning storyteller, deftly weaving together the stories of the four women, and gliding over the surface of her narrative without ever considering the truly disruptive potential of radical feminism, or linking it to the other mighty struggles for power, resources and survival currently sweeping our planet. There is one powerful scene, recounted after the event, in which Soave suggests that the rampant sexism Carole’s husband witnesses in his all-consuming job as a banker, and the appalling attitudes to women of some of his colleagues, is in some way linked to their worship of wealth and brute financial force, and to the intrinsic sadism of an ideology that always puts profit before people.

That glimpse of a more far-reaching analysis quickly vanishes, though, as Carole and Dennis change their own lives, but continue to enjoy the financial fruits of his banking career, throwing a glamorous party at Greyfriars Hall on the banks of the Clyde. And in that sense, Soave’s novel - although driven by her recognition of the reality of everyday sexism - eventually begins to seem more like a 21st century fairytale than a story rooted in real lives. By the end, all three of the single women are on their way to finding new love, while both the men who figure most prominently in the tale turn out to be heroes and allies, despite - in at least one case - ample evidence to the contrary. And the summer moonlight sparkles on the fast-flowing Clyde; in this story of a world briefly touched by a little feminism lite, but never seriously challenged at all.

Graffiti Girls, by Elissa Soave, HQ, £16.99