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\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Jason Howard\/Bauer-Griffin\/GC Images, Simon & Schuster, Ballantine Books\n <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot of sex in Jennette McCurdy\u2019s debut novel, Half His Age \u2014 more than you might otherwise expect. The former Nickelodeon star and I\u2019m Glad My Mom Died author strives for discomfort as her protagonist, Waldo, a 17-year-old student in Alaska, has sex again and again and again with her 40-year-old English teacher, Mr. Korgy. Half His Age isn\u2019t endorsing their relationship; anyone even a little bit familiar with McCurdy\u2019s writing knows that she\u2019s compelled by female rage and\u00a0the way young women are used and discarded. So much of Half His Age, however, leans on that using and discarding as a repeated narrative beat to show us just how poorly Waldo is treated and how cheap she thinks of herself as being. With little to no foil for this dismaying existence, however, Half His Age often succumbs to shock value in lieu of pushing beyond that which offends.<\/p>\n
Waste is a tenet of Half His Age. Waldo can\u2019t locate a sense of self-worth amid the squalor and rubble that is her life. Her mother is a negligent sex and love addict who can\u2019t prioritize her daughter over a date. Waldo spends her evenings alone at home, clicking around on the Sephora website. She works at Victoria\u2019s Secret, but all that money goes toward more online shopping \u2014 all of which fuels her need to make herself more desirable. She has and dumps various boyfriends, none of whom can satisfy her urges. Sexual attraction is not what draws Waldo to her teacher. Instead, it\u2019s her desire to be around someone so unlike herself \u2014 and so unavailable. Unlike her fast food and cosmetics, Mr. Korgy is not immediately accessible.<\/p>\n
Korgy only resists Waldo\u2019s advances for so long, the two of them more or less coupling up by the time the school year hits Thanksgiving break. McCurdy writes their sex scenes with a lurid fervor, as Waldo gets off on the idea of her own youth. Lolita narratives are nothing new in fiction, but the only thing McCurdy really challenges is the point of view. Waldo\u2019s attraction to Korgy is genuine, insofar as the character is aware of herself, but their relationship does not really develop because both characters are stuck in an arrested development. Waldo also has no point of reference for male authority figures before him; she was raised without a father and can\u2019t summon much respect for her peers. She\u2019s bored of her classmates, including Nolan, a guy who might actually be good for her. When Waldo goes to meet his family, she immediately dismisses their stability. \u201cIt\u2019s in their settled eyes, their understanding head nods, their courteous, boundaried phrasing. This explains Nolan,\u201d Waldo says. \u201cPeople who come from functioning families just don\u2019t have the same charge as the rest of us.\u201d Waldo knows that might be bullshit (\u201cmaybe it\u2019s just a false narrative I cling to\u201d), but rather than unpack that, she once again falls in line with Korgy, and McCurdy shifts back into writing repetitive sex scenes and tedious descriptions of both characters\u2019 disparate physical identities. We only need to know so many times how hot Waldo is compared to Korgy\u2019s dumpy frame.<\/p>\n
All of this might feel a little more nuanced or palatable if Korgy were less of a stereotype. \u201cAfter we eat, we cuddle up and Korgy pops on a movie he wants me to see, some arthouse movie or foreign film that he reminds me we\u2019d never be able to watch if not for his Criterion Channel subscription, as if the subscription is something exclusive you have to be invited into and not just something that costs eleven bucks a month,\u201d Waldo recounts. \u201cWhile we watch, he relays his thoughts like they\u2019re the director\u2019s cut commentary and I struggle to keep my eyes open.\u201d He wants Waldo to keep up with \u201cChekhov and Tolstoy and George Saunders\u201d as well as \u201cBergman and Kubrick and Kurosawa.\u201d For all the depth and contradiction that McCurdy grants Waldo, Korgy is frustratingly one-note. If there were less of him to contend with in the novel, that might not be as big of an issue, but he is unfortunately ever-present. McCurdy doesn\u2019t have to make him a well-rounded or even remotely sympathetic character \u2014 especially when he\u2019s cheating on his wife with a literal child \u2014 but his outsize presence in the book starts to detract more than it does complicate or enrich the narrative. \u201cI think we can afford more nuance and gray area,\u201d McCurdy said<\/a>, but there\u2019s no grayness to Korgy at all.<\/p>\n McCurdy shines when she\u2019s writing about anything but Korgy. Waldo\u2019s undeveloped relationships with her mother and best friend (kind of) Frannie deserve more examination. One of them ignores her and the other smothers her, but these female relationships wind up being the most foundational of any of Waldo\u2019s interactions. Korgy, stuck in stereotype and immaturity, holds Waldo back both narratively and emotionally. Their sex scenes are designed to alienate readers, McCurdy repeatedly emphasizing how wrong it all is, but they also eat up a lot of the novel\u2019s oxygen such that shock value starts to become its only value. In I\u2019m Glad My Mom Died, McCurdy goes back and forth between scenes of shockingly graphic nature with how she navigated the public (screaming phone calls from her mom when she popped up on TMZ) and private (ongoing identity crisis) aspects of her childhood stardom. Waldo, despite being the novel\u2019s narrator, shows us only one side of herself. Only as she starts to wake up to the limits of what Korgy can provide her does Half His Age start to subvert reader expectations, but by then the book is very nearly over. \u201cThe sex has never just been about sex,\u201d Waldo explains. \u201cIt\u2019s been about what the sex has communicated to me.\u201d The same can be said of Half His Age \u2014 once the sex stops, the conversation can actually begin.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Jason Howard\/Bauer-Griffin\/GC Images, Simon & Schuster, Ballantine Books There\u2019s a lot of sex in Jennette…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[223,201790,88,201791,201793,201792,190800,3,22112,201794,92],"class_list":["post-423320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-books","tag-celebrity-memoir","tag-entertainment","tag-fiction-debut","tag-half-his-age","tag-im-glad-my-mom-died","tag-jennette-mccurdy","tag-news","tag-novels","tag-so-high-school","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}