INAPPROPRIATION

By Lexi Freiman

351 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.

Satire is a difficult genre to neatly define, but if we call it the use of humor, irony and exaggeration to expose the stupidity of certain parts of contemporary culture, then “Inappropriation,” Lexi Freiman’s debut, is certainly a satirical novel.

Ziggy Klein, the protagonist, has a fitting name. She zigs and zags through opinions and ways of seeing the world over the course of the book, always in search of understanding. We meet this curious Australian teenager just after she leaves her Jewish school and begins attending the upper-crust Kandara, a private school for girls in Sydney. To get an idea of the strata attending, the book’s opening scene describes an American movie star, who has come to see his daughter perform in the school musical, making a break for it before he can be ambushed by a horde of schoolgirls; though he remains unnamed, most readers will recognize him as Tom Cruise. The students at Kandara, in other words, are for the most part megawealthy and uber-privileged. Ziggy’s ability to attend makes it clear that even though her mother is a hippie-dippy therapist and her dad a newly buff accountant, they too are well off.

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When even the unpopular girls are rich, if not always pretty, how will they attempt rebellion and nonconformity? This question is amply answered as Ziggy makes friends with the social outcasts Lex, who was adopted from Bangladesh by aging white Australians, and Tessa, who lost an arm to cancer and wears a prosthetic. Tessa and Lex try to instruct Ziggy in the ways of oppression, but they do it in the most misinformed, self-serving, and wrongheaded ways possible. While Lex and Tessa are marginalized for obvious reasons — neither brown nor disabled women have an easy time in our able-bodied, majority-white society — they instead revel in a host of misunderstood categories that pit them against the popular schoolgirls and allow them to feel morally superior. Using Donna Haraway’s 1984 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” as their skimmed-through bible, the girls make bold and nonsensical statements like, “Moses made the Israelites wander the desert for 40 years so that they would forget their bondage. Which explains the amnesia between third-wave and postfeminism,” and “The prison-industrial complex is making it nearly impossible for black people to stay straight.”