TW: Statutory rape and sexual assault
My book club elected to discuss this book by Susan Choi. I had never heard of it, but the audiobook was readily available from my library, so I went ahead and downloaded it.
I don’t know what to make of this book.
I really disliked the first half. There are a lot of explicit scenes of sex between teenagers, to the point where it felt, not just like pornography, but child pornography. I don’t claim to be so naive as to assume teenagers don’t have sex, but there’s a difference between being a teenager talking about sex with your friends, and being an adult reading about teenagers having sex. There’s also a rather explicit sex scene between a sixteen-year-old girl and a grown man that I found pretty disturbing.
Then the book took a turn.
If it hadn’t been for the fact that my book club would be discussing the book, I would have bailed on it before getting through the first half, but I ended up being glad I stuck it out.
The first half of the book focuses on the lives of a group of teenagers attending a prestigious theater school, in the class of a teacher named Mr. Kingsley, who embodies the stereotype of the male, gay acting coach (although I think at one point there’s a mention of a student getting pregnant, insisting Kingsley is the father, Kingsley denies it, and she ends up retracting her accusation).
The book primarily focuses on two teenagers, Sarah and David, who have a brief romance consisting of little more than a few glances acknowledging their mutual hotness and a few rolls in the hay. Their utter inability to communicate with each other brings the relationship to a swift and painful end, culminating in Sarah sleeping with Liam, a man who’s visiting from England while bringing a production of Candide to the school, although the production ends up falling through.
Sarah is not forced, or even particularly coerced into having sex with Liam. The two of them are thrown together (which is gross enough on its own), and Sarah goes along with it because she’s missing David.
That’s pretty much the end of the first half. The second half is told from the perspective of Karen (a name that has a whole new meaning all its own these days that I doubt it had while Choi was writing this book). Karen was a minor figure in the first half of the book. Her main feature was that she had a car, a trait of which Sarah was profoundly envious. Karen was also having an affair with Martin, the other half of the Liam/Martin duo visiting from England to put on a production of Candide.
We learn from Karen that the first half of the book is actually a novel that adult Sarah has written and published and is now on tour to promote, but Sarah is not her real name, Karen is not her real name, etc. All of the characters we met in the first half of the book are based on “real” people with different names, but “Karen” continues to use the names from the pseudonyms because she thinks they fit, but really it’s so the reader doesn’t get too confused trying to figure out who’s who, and for that, Choi, I thank you.
Sarah changed more than the names, she also took liberties with people, relationships, and events as they were in “reality”. For example, far from being just a sidekick in Sarah’s story, Karen was actually Sarah’s best friend. Although Karen did sleep with “Martin” and Sarah slept with “Liam”, Sarah’s book doesn’t cover the power dynamics, which are oddly reversed in those two relationships.
Rather than Liam having all the power over Sarah, Sarah holds all the power over him because he seems to genuinely love her – or at least is fascinated by her – whereas he’s nothing more than a rebound for her.
By contrast, Karen falls for Martin (or, at least she thinks she falls for him), but he just uses her and loses her.
Fast forward a decade or so and Sarah is a published author, Karen moved back home after a stint in New York, is busy avoiding her mother while working as an administrative assistant for various people, including David, who’s running a theater company that’s struggling financially, so he can’t afford to pay anyone for anything, including paying Karen for everything she does to keep the company from going under. Her many talents include including filing, writing grants and press releases, keeping the website up to date, and making sure the taxes get paid.
Meanwhile, back in England, Martin has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women and David is shocked and appalled and extremely defensive of his friend and mentor. He rants to Karen over drinks and she just listens. When he mentions, as examples, their own conduct as teenagers, Karen points out that they were children, but David insists they “were never children”.
Having recently gotten into an altercation with my dad and my brother over rape culture that very quickly devolved into both of them screaming at me and then my dad manhandling me, I found it very interesting to see the same conversation play out very differently in this book. Rather than arguing, Karen just listens to David rant, and when he insists she validate his point, she simply says, “I’m not arguing with you,” which is true, but that’s not the same as agreeing with him either. It was subtle, but as someone who’s recently been in that situation, I saw all the signs of a woman not wanting to rile up a man, but also not giving him any more than the bare minimum to placate him.
David points to Karen’s own relationship with Martin (it wasn’t a secret) and the fact that she wasn’t a victim, and Karen doesn’t deny that either, at which point we get a kind of flashback of what “really” happened between Martin, Karen, Liam, and Sarah.
As previously mentioned, Sarah was just using Liam as a rebound, and although Martin treated Karen like shit, that doesn’t change the fact that she “desired” him, she chose him. She doesn’t outright deny the allegations of his accusers, but she does look down on them as wanting to blame someone else for their own mistakes, rather than hold themselves accountable for their own choices.
It’s definitely complicated when the younger member of the couple is a teenager and therefore thinks they have agency, without realizing how easily manipulated they are – and how good predators are at manipulating them. Overall, I thought the book handled the touchy subject very well, doing a fair job of showing both sides.
Then the very last chapter completely messed with me and I have no idea what was going on there. We meet a girl named Claire, who is clearly the daughter of Karen and Martin (in “real” life, not in the book within a book that was the first half of this story), although Martin never knew about her and Karen gave her up for adoption. After her adopted mother dies, Claire goes searching for her birth mother. She becomes convinced she was a student of someone named Robert Lord and she asks him about her. Lord lures Claire to his home, where he pins her against a door, shoves his tongue down her throat and her hand down his pants and wtf?
I’m pretty sure Robert Lord is meant to be the “real” Kingsley, the acting teacher from the first half of the book, but Kingsley was gay and in a long-term relationship with another man, whereas that was clearly never the case for Lord and, other than Claire being Karen’s daughter, I don’t understand the point of that chapter. Was Lord the real predator? There were several mentions of Kingsley singling out Sarah and having private time with her in his office, so did she make him gay in her novel to cover up what was really going on there? I’m so confused.