My Dark Vanessa
(William Morrow, $28)
“To call this book a ‘conversation piece’ or ‘an important book’ feels belittling,” said Kim Liggett in The Washington Post. Kate Elizabeth Russell’s heavily promoted debut is “so much more than that,” because it’s at once electrifying and as “brilliantly crafted” as the venerated 1955 novel it talks back to. Vanessa Wye, Russell’s narrator, was 15 when she was gifted a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita by the 42-year-old male prep school teacher who coaxed her into a sexual relationship that Vanessa, even in her 30s, continues to interpret as having been a romance. Russell doesn’t try to match Nabokov’s florid prose, said Katie Roiphe in The New York Times. Occasionally—very occasionally—her purposefully plainer writing “veers toward clunkiness.” But Russell’s so-called Lolita for the #MeToo era proves to be “an astute account of brokenness,” a compelling study in the lasting damage wrought by predatory older men.
Though the narrator herself resists framing the story this way, “Russell captures the insidious cunning with which Mr. Strane flatters, grooms, and seduces Vanessa,” said Heller McAlpin in NPR.org. He tells her she’s special for her age, a fellow romantic, and that she has enormous power over him. “He also convinces her that she’s dark and bad, and that he would have done nothing if she didn’t want him to.” In the present, Strane has been freshly accused of abuse by a past student who succeeded Vanessa, yet still our protagonist hangs onto the interpretation in which she held the power.