MY DARK VANESSA

KATE ELIZABETH RUSSELL

4th Estate, 384pp, £12.99

This first novel about a relationship between a 15-year-old pupil and her 42-year-old English teacher at an elite boarding school in Maine 20 years ago was published with great fanfare after selling for a seven-figure sum. Stephen King hailed it as ‘dynamite’ while one of Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers argued – unsuccessfully – that a female juror at his trial should be removed because she had been spotted reading a novel which had already been hailed as a key text of the Me Too movement. The story is told by Vanessa Wye and moves between her messy unhappy life aged 32 and the beginning and then the middle of her affair with Jacob Strane, the teacher who sidestepped exposure by arranging for Vanessa to be expelled from the school. Despite this betrayal the adult Vanessa clings to a version of the affair which prevents her from joining forces with other victims of Strane.

In the New York Times Katie Roiphe described Vanessa as ‘a classic unreliable narrator’ and the novel as a ‘complex, inventive, resourceful examination of harm and power’. Johanna Thomas-corr in the

Sunday Times, was less impressed. She disliked the combination of ‘slushy erotica (“I’m soft belly vulnerable”) with the knowing commentary of a writer with one eye on the commercial zeitgeist’. But in the Guardian Sofka Zinovieff, whose novel Putney covers some of the same ground, praised the novel’s intelligence.

The novel is a ‘complex examination of harm and power’