A young woman begins an affair with her teacher
The text contains spoilers.
Each time one book is sold with the fact that it is “trending on Tiktok” a kitten dies, and it would have been easy to play the role of elitist when describing Jennette McCurdy’s debut novel with the extremely unimaginative title “Half his age”, which now comes in a Swedish translation. You could have pointed out the lack of characterization and you could have pointed out the Lolita-esque cover with red lips sucking fingers, and all the graphic sex scenes, that even the first sentence reads: “It’s a shame to complain when a guy licks you, I know, but sometimes it’s hard not to”. You could have used all that and stated the obvious: of course it gets noticed.
But there is also so much that is good, not least the many sex scenes. They don’t pretend. Inequality is the engine of the story, even in the erotica – the main character Waldo becomes obsessed with the teacher of his writing class, Mr. Korgy.
There are plenty of obstacles: he is, precisely, twice as old, also married and has children. And then that detail with teacher and student. Finally, Waldo manages to get him on the hook, and they begin an affair, at first without either of them imagining that he is going to leave his wife. Instead, they are relegated to the back seats of cars and that Jonas Lundqvist would call “strange restaurants” far out of town where you (he) pay in cash. She wants more, he is only willing to give a few percent.
Classic gender role problems, then, which “Half his age” is not alone in pushing to the surface: the debut novel “Yesteryear” by the journalist will be published these days Caro Claire Burkewhich also topped New York Times lists and … yes, another kitten died there. There, it is the tradwife trend that is analyzed – housewife influencer Nathalie suddenly wakes up in the year 1805, and finds out just how much fun it really is with colostrum, farm-fresh eggs and being glued to the stove.
The fun of “Half his age” is that gender roles are allowed to be romantic and actually work. For a while. He wants to be adored and she wants to adore. Say the relationship that is free of power dynamics? Or as McCurdy sums it up so succinctly: “He asks about my future and I ask about his past”. You are reminded that much of what can be interpreted as typically rude can also be a tender proof of love. Why would it be embarrassing to recommend books and music? You want to show the one you love to the whole world.
McCurdy is also adept at capturing the different stages of a forbidden relationship: the feeling before, when the head tells itself that it is still in control, even though the body has already crossed several thresholds. Or if it’s the other way around. The rabbit hole stage, where the obsession has made boundaries impossible to maintain. The total calm that can only occur when you are in the middle of chaos.
She also adds a final stage where most writers had already stopped. Namely, that the eighteen-year-old and the forty-year-old actually get each other and he leaves his wife. See, the men can actually live up to their words sometimes!
As McCurdy dares to include this, a terrible ending number arises: What happens when you were wrong? We see it all the time on primetime on SVT. All the countless seasons of “Married at First Sight” could be summed up by the utter horror of having bet and hoped for someone, who in the end is just a stranger among all the others.
Korgy appears more and more ridiculous the longer the novel goes on, more and more like Ester’s object of desire in “Egenmächtigt prodötning”. But in Lena Andersson’s novel, the closer you get to his core, the man becomes more and more empty. In “Half his age”, it could rather have been interpreted as Waldo’s cooling infatuation distorting the picture. Maybe she is the one who has lured the man to destroy an at least perfectly okay life, and then to knit when she gets tired.
I don’t know if one is to draw any far-reaching conclusions from the fact that traditional gender roles seem to be the sexiest thing young Booktokers can imagine. Somewhat optimistically, one could interpret it as something that is relatively absent in people’s lives, and therefore attractive. Or McCurdy’s scenario may contain an ideal that may itself be breaking the norm:
“I want the little snap of pain, the swish of the drops of blood, the smell of metal. It’s disgusting, but this is exactly what I want. I don’t want poems, nervous hands, longing looks, picnic blankets, daisies and candlelit dinners. I want so much more. Something truer. Uglier. I want a common place, a place so shameless and ugly that we can’t turn back from it. We are united there. My imprint on him is impossible to erase.”
Jack Hildén is a writer and temporary deputy culture director at Aftonbladet.
