“Brown Girls”, a daring debut that follows her characters through life and beyond

Andreades follows his cohort through their careers, marriages, affairs and divorces, and into old age. Along the way, many topics are brought back to the exam. Like a DJ, the author picks up the needle and puts it back in unexpected places.

In “Brown Girls”, the nostalgia is complicated. The women return to Queens to visit, and a landslide of memories rushes in: “This is where I chased an ice cream truck for five creepy blocks, Edel says”; “Lisa confesses, I ran away from my mom on a day like this”; “At this intersection,” says Dee, “I saw a girl get run over by a bus.

For many of them, for a thousand psycho-sociological reasons, returning home is impossible.

Andreades’ writing has economy and freshness. “Brown Girls” reads as much like poetry as it does a novel, which is another way of putting it: don’t come here expecting a lot of intrigue.

The chapters are short, the size of a ramekin. The novel always seems to stop and start over, as Janet Malcolm did in “Forty-one False Starts,” her New York portrayal of painter David Salle.

This quality can relieve Andreades from doing the hard work of exploring the character, or the ideas, in depth.

Some of these brunette girls are marrying white boys, and they’re in conflict over it. In bars later in life they stare at dark-haired men. “Write our numbers on napkins. Go trembling.

Virginia Woolf called the death “the only experience I will never describe.” Andreades follows his characters into the afterlife. We slide behind them, like on a parachute.

Death! It tastes like feces, she writes, and also “water purified by the gravels of the Loire”. It is in a way in the continuity of this intrepid novel that tasting notes are provided.