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 ... 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 ... Sex is, of course, another way we try to be made real, witnessed into fleshliness when we feel like hot air ... 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.
Half His Age often succumbs to shock value in lieu of pushing beyond that which offends ... Lolita narratives are nothing new in fiction, but the only thing McCurdy really challenges is the point of view.
Literature is rife with memoirs and works of autofiction about ravening English teachers, accounts of mentors who allegedly groomed vulnerable girls with writing and manipulated their own words. Half His Age is resolutely not one of these books ... Half His Age is much more thrilling in the first half than in the second ... But McCurdy’s furious writing—her dystopian rendering of a culture squandering its dreams and desires on the crack high of cheap stuff—is hard to tear yourself away from.
Unfolds at an almost frantic clip ... The tonal shifts — hilarious, gross, disturbing, poignant — seem designed to induce motion sickness ... McCurdy has entered a crowded subgenre ... To those acquainted with the trend, its insights will mostly feel familiar: how our desires endanger us; how teenagers look for a sense of identity in all the wrong places; the vulnerability and power of girlhood.
The scenes of intimacy are a particular masterclass, McCurdy linking Waldo’s masochism with the illusion of control in the very uneven power dynamic ... A bleak, often hilarious and uncomfortable triumph that underscores McCurdy’s talent for focusing in on the multilayered nature of trauma and artfully unpicking it, one scab at a time.
While the novel is certainly audacious and thought-provoking (particularly given McCurdy’s first-hand experience of such a relationship), Waldo never really came alive to me on the page ... The novel is undoubtedly a page-turner: the writing is razor-sharp, sparse and unpretentious.
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.
Half His Age isn’t bad, but it feels rushed in comparison to the consideration that was evident—and widely praised—in McCurdy’s previous book, which seemed honed over years.
The prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy ... Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing. A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
