A novel about sex, consumerism, class, desire, loneliness, the internet, rage, intimacy, power, and the lengths we’ll go to in order to get what we want.
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.
