Whatever you might think you’re going to get from the familiar setup of Jennette McCurdy’s Half His Age (a lonely high-school girl in Anchorage begins an extremely questionable sexual relationship with her teacher), any presumptions are dispelled from the very first page. When Waldo, the teenage narrator of the novel, observes her boyfriend’s “slimy tongue that loop-de-loops over and over like a carnival ride, mechanical and passionless,” she’s setting a tone: irreverent, graphic, bilious.
McCurdy is much more interested in late capitalism than in Lolita. Waldo’s world has long been poisoned by the microwavable meals her disinterested mother leaves out, the fast-fashion crop tops she orders that come with a cancer warning, the laptop she falls asleep clutching at 2 a.m., its unnatural heat “searing my ovaries.” By the time she meets Mr. Korgy, her frowsy middle-aged creative-writing instructor, on page 11, she is already imprinted on the reader as a caustic force of anti-nature.
And so she seduces Korgy—of course she does. Their relationship ensues through the slow erosion of boundaries, mostly instigated by her but sometimes by him. She masturbates using a bottle of tropical-fruit-flavored Tums while stalking his Instagram. He praises her writing and asks her to stay after class; he later invites her to dinner at his home with his wife. She sends him a thank-you email with her phone number. He calls her. And so on, until they’re frantically humping in a janitorial closet, in her childhood bedroom, at hotels (after fancy dinners where people assume he’s her father). Mr. Korgy—his first name is Theodore, but Waldo never uses it—is no scheming predator. His wife calls him “Teddy” and tells emasculating anecdotes about him. He’s soft and pitiable where Waldo is ferocious in her loneliness and adept at transforming herself into various alluring guises.
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. But McCurdy, who, as a child, starred in Nickelodeon shows alongside Ariana Grande and Miranda Cosgrove, knows well all the ways underage girls can be flattened and plasticized by adults—turned into objects. Her previous book, I’m Glad My Mom Died, recounted McCurdy’s childhood being coerced into performing by her narcissistic and mentally unstable mother, who introduced her daughter to ritualized anorexia at the age of 11 and was such a hoarder, storing objects in every bedroom in the house, that her children had to sleep on Costco mats on the living-room floor. (McCurdy also wrote about a man she called The Creator, widely speculated to be the Nickelodeon executive Dan Schneider, who has faced multiple accusations of inappropriate conduct and abuse; Schneider has denied many of the allegations, but apologized for making people uncomfortable on set.)
[Read: Don’t judge I’m Glad My Mom Died by its title]
Half His Age, though, isn’t about abuse, or exploitation, or even the power dynamics of what we now call “age-gap relationships,” even as Waldo is bracingly aware of the occasions when Mr. Korgy manipulates her emotionally, and far too astute to fall for his “I want to expose you to art and films and music and books” schtick. The book reads much more like a postmodern novel for the fast-fashion generation, a portrait of civilizational decline told through declining mall chains, ultra-processed foods, and relentless consumption. Online shopping isn’t just a compulsion for Waldo—it’s an assertion of her existence.
Temporally, Half His Age is hard to place. Waldo refers to Instagram and TikTok but doesn’t scroll; she obsesses over her appearance, grooming herself with rigor and self-loathing, but doesn’t post pictures of herself or seem to have an online footprint beyond her shopping orders. She lives in Alaska, but all we hear about it is that her summer days are “bloated” and her winters bleak. Her local hangouts are wholly generic: Waldo works at Victoria’s Secret to fund her shopping habit, eats breakfast with her mom at Denny’s, and survives on Auntie Anne’s pretzels, Marie Callender’s entrees, and Sour Patch Kids. She rattles off cosmetic brand names the same way Mr. Korgy lists his favorite directors (“Bergman and Kubrick and Kurosawa, Lonergan and Linklater and Solondz”)—as a way of underscoring her identity, even if it’s homogenous. Brands are omnipresent in her life, as extant as air. (When the two have sex in Korgy’s car, the feeling of Cheerio crumbs being ground into Waldo’s knees becomes a staple part of the experience.)
McCurdy’s brittle commentary made me think of Don DeLillo’s description of the supermarket in White Noise, with all the hyperreal produce “sprayed, burnished, bright” and inserted into “filmy bags.” At some point in the 20th century, the critic Cynthia Deitering has written of that novel, humanity oversaw one of its most profound transformations: “a shift from a culture defined by its production to a culture defined by its waste.” In DeLillo’s imagination, the specter hovering over all of this unnatural abundance is death; in McCurdy’s, it’s desire. How is Waldo supposed to know what she really wants when her synapses are distorted by the dopamine thrill of acquisition, the heart-stopping kick of something new? She’s not exactly surrounded by appealing prospects. “You think some beefy senior’s gonna be emotionally available between his rounds of Grand Theft Auto and his daily hour of Pornhub?” she tells Mr. Korgy. What she’s most drawn to in her teacher is the way he seems to live outside her dull, trashy monoculture. But his Crate & Barrel throw pillows are no more authentic than her mom’s HOME SWEET HOME Target doormat, or the Le Labo candles and coffee-table books at Waldo’s rich friend Frannie’s house. When Korgy Amazon-ships Waldo a grocery order of some of his favorite nourishing foods, she can manage only three bites of the “chocolate paleo crunch granola with almond milk” before throwing it away.
In structural terms, Half His Age is much more thrilling in the first half than in the second, when Waldo’s frenzied fixation on Mr. Korgy curdles into a much more predictable entanglement. 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. “Few adult persons can see nature,” another Waldo once wrote. Is that kind of transcendent communion with the real world even possible anymore? Half His Age might make you wonder.
