It is clear from the drugs and the booze, her pained family relations and stalled career, that Vanessa’s life has been derailed
with me,” the Vanessa Wye of 2017 tells the reader, and herself. Another victim has denounced Jacob Strane, the high-school teacher who “tried so hard to be good”, but Vanessa is sure that her case is different. Or almost sure: her memories are “shadowy, incomplete”, and she needs Strane “to fill in the gaps”, as he always has. Yet it is clear from the drugs and the booze, her pained family relations and stalled career as a hotel concierge, that her life has been derailed.
The scene of Kate Elizabeth Russell’s gripping and unsettling debut novel switches to 2000, when Vanessa, again narrating, is at a boarding school in Maine, a vulnerable outsider on a scholarship. She is 15; Strane is 42. His practised grooming techniques are deniable but unmistakable, albeit not to Vanessa herself. He pays her creepy compliments. “I’m special,” she rhapsodises. “I’m special. I’m special.
Strane’s crimes, and their consequences, unspool in alternating chapters. He and Vanessa continue to see each other, even though—as the reader understands, though she does not—she is soon too old for his tastes. As the split-screen manipulation proceeds, the real question is not whether Strane will be caught, but whether Vanessa will be: caught, that is, by the reality of her past, which would wreck the love story that she has spun around her trauma.
On one level, Ms Russell’s tale is a reimagining of “Lolita”, a copy of which Strane gives Vanessa; her title comes from “Pale Fire”, another book by Vladimir Nabokov. But beyond its main villain, this novel’s stealthy power comes from the ambient sexism and harassment that Vanessa and the other female characters suffer from lousy—but ordinary—men: a creep who tries to pick her up at a bowling alley, guests at the hotel, handsy guys in bars, cruel adolescent boys.
In its evocation of the mix of knowingness and naivety that characterises teenagers, plus its frankness about female sexuality and the psychology of victimhood, this is a bracingly uncompromising book. It will doubtless be devoured with an ache of recognition by large numbers of women. But it really ought to be read by men.
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