“Half His Age” by Jennette McCurdy was released on Tuesday, Jan. 20, making it one of the newest novels of this year. And it’s certainly trying its hardest to focus on the specific modern problem plaguing its society. Waldo, a 17-year-old Alaskan protagonist, buys more clothing and makeup products online than could possibly be counted, narrates scrolling through Instagram reels, and enters a relationship with her high school teacher that everyone but her can see is a bad idea from the get-go. It’s about a specific type of alienation that McCurdy seems to suggest comes from where we are as a society, now.
This topic, however, is not where the novel succeeds. Its critique of consumerism is repetitive and mostly surface level, being aimed at a not-exactly-controversial issue. It’s the larger reasons behind consumerism that people are debating, and this isn’t exactly a topic that McCurdy seems interested in covering.
The novel has a feminist angle, which I suppose is the only way to cover topics of this nature. Still, I don’t think that any reader will get any sort of deeper meaning from this that will change the way they think of consumerism, or even give any new insights into these well-trod subjects. I also don’t suppose that there’s a way for it to pull any tricks of that nature, given that it is about relationships that she and every reader across America thinks are bad (adult-teenager relationships and teacher-student relationships). None of this would be a problem per se if the novel felt cognizant of that fact, but it feels like McCurdy has a goal with the book’s themes that she does not fulfill.
That being said, I read this book beginning to end from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. one night while only taking breaks to use the restroom and occasionally to worry about Waldo when everything got to be just too much. A quick Google search suggests that many people had a similar reading experience to me.
Waldo’s voice is hilarious, real, and deeply drawn. She uses simple language that strikes at very deep points. It’s hard not to relate to her, even as she is doing unrelatable actions (mostly having a relationship with her high school teacher).
A great example of her simple humor comes when she is working at a retail store early into her relationship with her teacher. “Black Friday in any retail store is the best case study of consumer behavior, a terrifying peek into how much pain one human is willing to inflict on another human to save five bucks on a lotion with glitter in it,” Waldo reflects. “I usually enjoy the people watching in a sick sort of way, but today I can’t. I’m exhausted. Only got two hours of sleep last night. Couldn’t find a comfortable position. Couldn’t stop the looping thoughts. Why’d I have to cross over that invisible line we were toeing by asking him to hang out one-on-one like a fucking twelve-year-old in the lunch room? I spooked him. I spoiled it. And now I’ve lost him.”
Similarly gripping is that this book doesn’t pull its punches. The New York Times compared it to “American Psycho,” which is fascinating considering that “American Psycho” is a New York novel full of violence, sex, drugs, and activity! The reality is that Waldo is really only going from where she lives to her school to her mall to her professor’s house, and there is no murdering and no drugs, but “Half His Age” gets under your skin by making the teacher she sleeps with as scarily realistic as possible. It’s easy to see what Waldo sees in him (he’s bookish and dorky) and what he sees in her (definitely a sexual attraction), but it’s much harder to predict what will come next with their relationship. The chapters are very short, but each one of them packs a wallop and leaves you in so much suspense that you’ll want to know what happens next. This makes it even harder to put the book down, because you can keep thinking, “I’ll just read one more chapter, it’ll only take me a couple of minutes.”
At multiple points, Waldo and her teacher consider breaking up, and occasionally, they do break up (always for very good reasons). At various points, it feels like Waldo finally has the upper hand, but those points are few and far between, leading to a very suspenseful ending. Waldo is smart and really, really funny and yet still entirely 17 years old, very lonely, and obsessive. This means she can often be trusted to have exactly the inappropriate reaction to something, even if she knows what she is doing is wrong.
This book will be a hard sell for two groups of people. There will be those who want the book to tackle head-on the bigger themes that it alludes to and want more than suspense and humor from a book. Then, there will also be those who just simply can’t take how disturbing the relationship is and how graphic the book gets while describing that relationship (and this does make sense, because sometimes the book’s description crosses the line into exploitation despite its clear feminist intentions). However, if you are not of the faint of heart and want to read something profoundly disturbing, interesting, and real, then perhaps this is the book for you.
Henry Kaplan can be reached at hrkaplan@wesleyan.edu.
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