Meike's Reviews > Half His Age

Don't underestimate the literary skill of former child actress Jennette McCurdy: This is a version of Lolita, but from Lolita's perspective, and it goes into very uncomfortable territory - which brought the chronically online without any media literacy to tears before the novel was even published. Listen, you idiots: Literature does not owe you comfort, and it's not doomed to deliver clear messages that are easy to digest. So move on or get ready to get be disturbed, but not without purpose: McCurdy tells the story of 17-year-old Waldo who enters an affair with her teacher, and she describes how the teenager struggles with her perceptions and emotions, and how she grapples with the power imbalance. Waldo is not stupid, and while she is a victim, being a victim is not her personality. The fact that the author gives us a complex character that is easy to identify with renders the novel so intriguing.

Waldo lives in a trailer park with her mother who had her when she was a teenager, and she has known nothing but a single parent trying to get by on minimum wage jobs while testing out a string of men who she hopes could fix her, until her next bout of depression. Meanwhile, Waldo, whose only friend is a Mormon she suspects to pity her, feels like she has to take care of the household. Waldo lives off highly processed foods and struggles with a shopping addiction that she finances with a job at "Victoria's Secret". From the women there and her mother, she learns about the importance of beauty for a woman, and internalizes that she has to manage her body accordingly. Enter new literature teacher Mr. Korgy (whom she will call by that name throughout the whole book): The fourtysomething teacher for literature is a failed writer with a wife, young child, and midlife crisis, and Waldo is intrigued by him.

What plays out then is, until around the middle part of the book, rather predictable, which doesn't detract from the enjoyment of reading the text though, because the star is the perspective: A smart teenager who suspects what's going on the whole time, but who is naive and lonely enough to go through wit it anyway. McCurdy is never pitying or belittling her main character, she gives her agency and great psychological plausibility, which makes this narrative so valuable: There is desire, and power, and a sense of adventure, but all these aspects never exculpate Mr. Korgy, but show why Waldo would act like that.

The most ironic aspect of some people whining that Waldo should have been a grown-up, and that McCurdy shouldn't have written so many and such explicit sex scenes between a teenager and a grown man, is that I firmly believe that this novel will do more to protect teenagers from predatory grown men than all well-intended, clean advice. Because McCurdy's text is honest and believable, it takes Waldo seriously and shows how even an alert girl can get caught up in such a situation. The author employs her unique position as a media figure with a heavy backstory (I’m Glad My Mom Died) to give a voice to victims, but not by instructing them, but by telling a story.

And I applaud that.