“She turns, and heads for the door to the street. I watch the stuff on the carpet swirl around her. Most of it settles back, but I notice a little gets on her shoes. I can see it very clearly, just like I can see that I am in more trouble than she is.” And Diana McBride is in trouble, that much is clear. She lives inside her mind in a way most of do not, with a severe meta-cognitive facility that is often at odds with her public persona. Kim Addonizio’s main character in her first novel, Little Beauties, is aware she is fractured. Her external self is perfect: the former child beauty queen, the repeat Employee of the Month. Inside, though, she is a mass of insecurities, and her Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is kept a secret from her mother, her husband, and is only emerging through therapy as something that can, perhaps, be normalized. In the mean time, Diana is tortured and ashamed; the husband has left; the relationship with her mother is still that of the little girl who smiles on command.

The Rules, things like, Shower After Emptying the Trash, expand and contract depending upon how Diana is faring in the world in and outside her own mind. Addonizio has done an admirable job of creating a character with OCD, though the temptation to indict Diana’s mother for causing the disease seems easy and a bit forced. For a story that presumes deeply to consider mother-daughter relationships (as well as cosmologies and spiritual matters), the suggestion of fault is a bit unsteady, and there just isn’t enough of the main character’s mother in the book to allow the reader to come to some understanding of the complex relationship.

Which is a shame, because they characters are interesting, having fraught and dramatic relationships. The reader learns more about Jamie, the pregnant teenager in the story who befriends and is befriended by Diana, and Jamie’s own mother. And what a group: Diana, on the verge of losing it due to the OCD and her husband’s leaving her; Jamie, pregnant, self-loathing, on her own due to her own painful relationship with her mom, and about to turn 18; Jamie’s mom taking care of semi-vegetative husband; Diana’s mom, a disappointed stage mother with a drinking problem and no husband, but serial boyfriends. Then, there’s Stella, the in utero character who speaks to the reader from a state of emerging consciousness as she moves toward birth. There’s a lot here about how women need each other, how they love each other, but so much about how they let each other down or feed into self-loathing and antagonistic relationships.

And what about the men? Missing dads, dads in comas, boys who love ‘em and leave ‘em, as they say. Nobody looks too good so far in Little Beauties. But then there’s Anthony who, dealing with his own grief, does kindly by both Jamie and Diana. Oddly, the death of Anthony’s wife and the birth of Stella are connected, hence, Addonizio’s cosmological underpinnings, but the real connection is the way in which he does not prey on Jamie, and the way in which he validates Diana’s woundedness and, even, makes it lovely. There’s a gorgeous scene where he showers with Diana (don’t expect a raging sex scene, because it ain’t). Showering and cleansing rituals are a huge problem for Diana vis a vis the OCD, but Anthony – we’d all like a guy like him – embraces it. In his own grief, he offers a healing path to others.

Now, the end is not stock, and Addonizio doesn’t offer a tightly packaged resolution of who is at fault for what or that getting a guy will solve anyone’s life. But the Rules do become Goals, and the path to beauty seems to be inward, not something that can be found in relation to others or in keeping up a public persona. There is a sense that people in trouble can help other people in trouble, but that, in the end, responsibility for oneself, the claiming of self-agency is the only way to get out of this world unbroken.

Little Beauties is charming and quirky, a swell read. Though some have talked of the novel’s language, the larger connection to poetry and Addonizio’s other work seems to be in image and in tone. There is a loosely held looseness, a firm hand on a live wire in this prose, and if the reader can give herself over to some of the unlikeliness, the story has a fantastic and slightly miraculous quality to it, as if the writer had a bit of awe, too, as the story unfolded. It has the feel of being discovered, the way a good poem feels unearthed, a surprise to us all. The fact that it is, in the end, hopeful, is a sweet surprise, too, given the times we live in, but it’s clear that hope is hard won.