Half His Age
Author: Jennette McCurdy
ISBN-13: 978-0008617691
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Guideline Price: £ 16.99
Former tween idol Jennette McCurdy knows how to get laughs – and how to use them. A child actor turned memoirist, she’s built a career grinding pain into punchlines.
Her first nonfiction book I’m Glad My Mom Died sold more than three million copies worldwide and stayed on The New York Times hardcover list for 60 weeks when it was first published in 2022. On its blush-pink cover, McCurdy smiles faintly, holding an urn filled with confetti.
Half His Age is her debut novel. It’s set in Anchorage, Alaska. Our narrator, a 17-year-old girl named Waldo, is a high-school student and a part-time employee at Victoria’s Secret. She has an absent father and an emotionally unstable mother who forgets to pay the bills.
She self-describes as “from a white trash trailer park”. She has a Mormon best friend who has trouble pronouncing words that end in “-ing”. This friend – along with many others – is displeased to learn that Waldo is having an affair with her creative writing teacher.
In one of her poems, Waldo defines herself as “a regret”. From this vantage point, anything is possible and nothing is; she has been doomed from the start. Generally, she is drawn to her teacher because he listens to her and affirms her talent. Specifically, she is drawn to her teacher because, for a couple of moments, he is able to engage her more effectively than her social media feed.
The writer Naomi Wolf once wrote that the media has co-opted young people’s sexuality so thoroughly as to make Freud irrelevant. This doesn’t entirely bear out in the novel, but it is worth mentioning that McCurdy’s narrator seems far more aroused by online shopping than by sex. To clear her head, she clears her cart. Despite her attempts, “No matter how much spit … how much dry-humping or making out … petting or edging … sex always falls short. Feels clunky and perfunctory.”
The rest of the novel charts Waldo’s ambivalence about her relationship. Along the way, McCurdy resists many gestures of trauma plot that have come to define MeToo-era fiction. The novel’s biggest strength is its deadpan, Bret-Easton-Ellis-adjacent ability to use comedy to get at “the absolute banality” of sexual objectification. Its biggest weakness is that it doesn’t have much else to offer.
Kristen Malone Poli is a PhD student in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin