Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Jason Howard/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images, Simon & Schuster, Ballantine Books
There’s a lot of sex in Jennette McCurdy’s debut novel, Half His Age — more than you might otherwise expect. The former Nickelodeon star and I’m Glad My Mom Died author strives for discomfort as her protagonist, Waldo, a 17-year-old student in Alaska, has sex again and again and again with her 40-year-old English teacher, Mr. Korgy. Half His Age isn’t endorsing their relationship; anyone even a little bit familiar with McCurdy’s writing knows that she’s compelled by female rage and the way young women are used and discarded. So much of Half His Age, however, leans on that using and discarding as a repeated narrative beat to show us just how poorly Waldo is treated and how cheap she thinks of herself as being. With little to no foil for this dismaying existence, however, Half His Age often succumbs to shock value in lieu of pushing beyond that which offends.
Waste is a tenet of Half His Age. Waldo can’t locate a sense of self-worth amid the squalor and rubble that is her life. Her mother is a negligent sex and love addict who can’t prioritize her daughter over a date. Waldo spends her evenings alone at home, clicking around on the Sephora website. She works at Victoria’s Secret, but all that money goes toward more online shopping — all of which fuels her need to make herself more desirable. She has and dumps various boyfriends, none of whom can satisfy her urges. Sexual attraction is not what draws Waldo to her teacher. Instead, it’s her desire to be around someone so unlike herself — and so unavailable. Unlike her fast food and cosmetics, Mr. Korgy is not immediately accessible.
Korgy only resists Waldo’s advances for so long, the two of them more or less coupling up by the time the school year hits Thanksgiving break. McCurdy writes their sex scenes with a lurid fervor, as Waldo gets off on the idea of her own youth. Lolita narratives are nothing new in fiction, but the only thing McCurdy really challenges is the point of view. Waldo’s attraction to Korgy is genuine, insofar as the character is aware of herself, but their relationship does not really develop because both characters are stuck in an arrested development. Waldo also has no point of reference for male authority figures before him; she was raised without a father and can’t summon much respect for her peers. She’s bored of her classmates, including Nolan, a guy who might actually be good for her. When Waldo goes to meet his family, she immediately dismisses their stability. “It’s in their settled eyes, their understanding head nods, their courteous, boundaried phrasing. This explains Nolan,” Waldo says. “People who come from functioning families just don’t have the same charge as the rest of us.” Waldo knows that might be bullshit (“maybe it’s just a false narrative I cling to”), but rather than unpack that, she once again falls in line with Korgy, and McCurdy shifts back into writing repetitive sex scenes and tedious descriptions of both characters’ disparate physical identities. We only need to know so many times how hot Waldo is compared to Korgy’s dumpy frame.
All of this might feel a little more nuanced or palatable if Korgy were less of a stereotype. “After we eat, we cuddle up and Korgy pops on a movie he wants me to see, some arthouse movie or foreign film that he reminds me we’d never be able to watch if not for his Criterion Channel subscription, as if the subscription is something exclusive you have to be invited into and not just something that costs eleven bucks a month,” Waldo recounts. “While we watch, he relays his thoughts like they’re the director’s cut commentary and I struggle to keep my eyes open.” He wants Waldo to keep up with “Chekhov and Tolstoy and George Saunders” as well as “Bergman and Kubrick and Kurosawa.” For all the depth and contradiction that McCurdy grants Waldo, Korgy is frustratingly one-note. If there were less of him to contend with in the novel, that might not be as big of an issue, but he is unfortunately ever-present. McCurdy doesn’t have to make him a well-rounded or even remotely sympathetic character — especially when he’s cheating on his wife with a literal child — but his outsize presence in the book starts to detract more than it does complicate or enrich the narrative. “I think we can afford more nuance and gray area,” McCurdy said, but there’s no grayness to Korgy at all.
McCurdy shines when she’s writing about anything but Korgy. Waldo’s undeveloped relationships with her mother and best friend (kind of) Frannie deserve more examination. One of them ignores her and the other smothers her, but these female relationships wind up being the most foundational of any of Waldo’s interactions. Korgy, stuck in stereotype and immaturity, holds Waldo back both narratively and emotionally. Their sex scenes are designed to alienate readers, McCurdy repeatedly emphasizing how wrong it all is, but they also eat up a lot of the novel’s oxygen such that shock value starts to become its only value. In I’m Glad My Mom Died, McCurdy goes back and forth between scenes of shockingly graphic nature with how she navigated the public (screaming phone calls from her mom when she popped up on TMZ) and private (ongoing identity crisis) aspects of her childhood stardom. Waldo, despite being the novel’s narrator, shows us only one side of herself. Only as she starts to wake up to the limits of what Korgy can provide her does Half His Age start to subvert reader expectations, but by then the book is very nearly over. “The sex has never just been about sex,” Waldo explains. “It’s been about what the sex has communicated to me.” The same can be said of Half His Age — once the sex stops, the conversation can actually begin.
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