HALF HIS AGE, by Jennette McCurdy
Jennette McCurdy likes to make people uncomfortable. This is perhaps best exemplified by the title of her smash-hit 2022 memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died.” That book is a staggering thing, a cleareyed account of her childhood as a Nickelodeon TV star with an abusive stage mom that is somehow both haunting, tender and funny.
“Half His Age” is McCurdy’s first novel, a reverse Lolita tale that dares you to flinch, squeal and/or chuck your book out the window, but ultimately rewards the fearless reader. Though it’s a classic bildungsroman, the reading experience felt more like watching a slasher flick, with me shaking my head and shouting to an empty room: “Don’t answer his text! Don’t go to his house! Don’t get your period in his closet!!!” This is a bold and unapologetic novel for edge-seekers, doom-scrollers, latchkey kids, horn-dogs and all those who love hard.
Our protagonist, Waldo, is a wry 17-year-old Alaskan who spends her days slutting around with boys she finds boring, blowing her savings on Shein hauls, working at Victoria’s Secret and judging everyone around her with preternaturally zingy one-liners. Her mother is a sex and love addict. Her father is out of the picture.
Everything changes when Waldo develops a crush on her creative writing teacher, Mr. Korgy, a paunchy 40-year-old haunted by broken dreams. Naturally, he’s married. He resists Waldo’s come-ons at first, but not really. They begin an affair, sneaking around and having sex in high-risk settings, like the bathroom during prom.
Like most men in age-gap relationships, Mr. Korgy gets off on telling Waldo all about his favorite things: “A Clockwork Orange,” David Foster Wallace, black-and-white movies. To the reader, he is a walking red flag; to Waldo, he is a delicious escape.
What McCurdy does frightfully well is invoke the particular psychosis of teenage girls, the lunacy that would lead a big-boobed wisecracker like Waldo to fall for a sad sack like Mr. Korgy. At the beginning of the novel, I found myself tormented by Waldo’s pursuit of him, by her porn-star cosplay as they boinked in his car.
“We twist around so I’m on top,” she informs us, “my knee pressing into the Cheerio crumbs ground into the seat cushion, and he tells me that I feel amazing, and he asks if I’m his good girl, and I say yes.”
Then again, what is teen girldom if not a manic vacillation between pretend wannabe Jezebel and heat-seeking little animal? I think of that line from “The Virgin Suicides” uttered by a suicidal tween: “Obviously, Doctor … you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.”
It is this longing, this instability, this hunger to be touched that McCurdy captures so vividly in Waldo. “Half His Age” becomes a slow burn, edging the reader as we beg Waldo’s prefrontal cortex to develop or, at the very least, for her to see what we see: This dude’s a loser.
Besides the obvious Nabokovian echoes (underage girl/old schmuck), I was reminded of Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” while reading. McCurdy brings exacting attention to material things in her book, to the fast fashion products and name-brand shampoos Waldo buys in a fugue state.
One chapter opens: “Tab. Tab. Tab. Tab. Add-to-cart add-to-cart add-to-cart add-to-cart. Knitwear and bag charms and brown Mary Janes, jumbo scrunchies and animal-print claw clips and faux-suede kitten-heel boots that can’t handle Alaska’s snow, but I don’t care. I keep adding.”
Both Waldo and Patrick Bateman are unreliable narrators with shifty or inchoate senses of self (Waldo because she is, well, still a child and Patrick Bateman because he is, well, a psychopath). Each clings to the belief that their stuff can define them from the outside in.
Sex is, of course, another way we try to be made real, witnessed into fleshliness when we feel like hot air. I felt so close to Waldo whenever she got ready for a date with Mr. Korgy, tearing up her closet and digging through her things, imploring them to offer her sex appeal, yes, but also coherence and stability. “Is there a level of beauty one can reach where they become undeniably wanted?” she asks. “And am I one lip stain shade away from that level? Spicy Sienna didn’t work last time, but maybe Berry Queen will.”
This is what “Half His Age” is ultimately about, scandal and sex scenes aside: the dead end of longing, whereby you ask people or things for the love they can’t give you, and how lonely this mismatch can feel.
Waldo asks: “What marks the rite of passage from girl to woman? A certain age? A broken heart? A fed-upness? A real bra?” I must confess, I don’t know.
HALF HIS AGE | By Jennette McCurdy | Ballantine Books | 288 pp. | $30
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