‘The Goodtime Girl’ by Tess Fragoulis


Reviewed by Elizabeth Bricknell




“I am the girl, the goodtime girl, who all the manghes crave.
 But my heart swells for only one, I’ll take my secret to the grave.” Tess Fragoulis’ second novel (she has also published a collection of short stories) follows the time-honoured theme of a wealthy, spoiled beauty who loses everything and stops at nothing to survive. It is important to note that it is set in the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-22), vaguely referred to as “The Catastrophe,” which is not fully explained until the most interesting chapter, twenty-four, which should be chapter two. Until then, such delicious teases as “even the Acropolis was fully occupied, laundry hanging between the columns of the Parthenon” punctuate the novel, bewitching yet confusing.

We are introduced to Kivelli Fotiathi as she is before her hometown of Smyrna is decimated. She is a timorous, dreamy girl whose greatest worry up to this point is forgetting her opera glasses (not to get a better look at the stage, but to scan the audience for suitors who are watching her). Next, she has been lifted from the ashes like a battered phoenix and taken to a bordello in Piraeus, where the Madam patiently waits for the highest bidder to buy her virginity. Fortunately, Kivelli’s beautiful singing voice is noticed by a patron and he whisks her off to entertain at his taverna/hash den.

She compares herself to “a hen in a den of foxes, a porcelain figure in a bullpen,” but gains respect from the manghes (tough guys) and gangsters with monikers such as Marinos the Moustache and Kostas the Knife, headed by the murderous Cucumber.
Through her writing style and Kivelli, Ms Fragoulis reveals her idol-worship of Colette, who is mentioned on both the second and second-last page, as well as several times throughout the book. Kivelli dreams of meeting her and becoming the toast of Paris, even becoming the heroine of her next novel.

The author seems inspired by Colette’s masterpiece “The Pure and the Impure,” with its dark atmosphere and erotic underground of an opium den, but it does not translate to a sleazy and mostly uneventful taverna where oily men are sucking on “narghiles” (hookahs) full of hash and stuffing themselves on mezzides (hors d’oevres).

Fragoulis takes her extensive flowery prose quite literally. The novel begins with, “Kivelli Fotiathi was a young woman in full blossom, a Smyrnean rose with a scent as fresh and intoxicating as an orchard at sunset.” She eats pastries in rose syrup. Bad men smelled of hash, good men of lemon verbena. Kivelli finds the lemony fragrance of the bordello distasteful, and voices her opinion that it should smell of roses or lilac. She trades lavender soap for a dress; her beaded necklace smells of cinnamon and a blue envelope of freesia; the letter within refers again to the rose pastries. She imagines the Virgin Mary to have rose-breath.
The characters are as transient as annuals but not nearly as beguiling. Perhaps, in this dystopian atmosphere, they have become hardened, shallow Machiavellians who are only capable of exploitation and expressions of either detachment or irritation.

Unfortunately, Kivelli also becomes a victim of underdevelopment, unless her shockingly shallow persona is intentional. During her considerable hardships, she learns “to sleep naked because it was the closest thing to sleeping in the silk Papa imported from the Orient.” She remains a vain, defiant, imperious opportunist of little substance, who forsakes her only close friend and falls in love with Diamantis, the womanizing young Sinatra of Piraeus.

Kivelli finds measured success in her musical career — the local songwriter, who penned the hits “Maria, Stop Your Nagging” and “Someone’s Stolen the Wine” writes her the above-quoted “Goodtime Girl” which continues with “Oh pretty boy, oh wicked boy, take pity on this tart/ Let me light your narghile with the flames that eat my heart.” Alas, karma is a nasty adversary and the book has a very moral foundation.
On checking out of her last hotel room, Kivelli fittingly tells the proprietor, “I haven’t left anything in there except the smell of my perfume.”
“That alone would be worth preserving,” he replies, kissing her hand and “indulging in a final sniff of her wrist.”
The novel ends with a neat, concise glossary of Greek terminology which is educational enough to order the necessities of vice on a trip to Athens. “Goodtime Girl” is like a bottle of Retsina — it reflects Greek history yet has a distinct taste of Pine-Sol, but you’ve paid good money and so you finish it.

Cormorant | 322 pages |  $21.00 | paper | ISBN #978-1897151730