One brief chapter about the toxic publicity ends:
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He’s not like boys your age.” The very grammar of these sentences reminds us of the element of empathy that’s so often missing in our regard for people ruined by the scandals that amuse us.Īnd even that gimmicky choose-your-own-adventure structure takes on a fascinating thematic role in the context of this story about a series of choices made by two people with very different levels of experience and power. “He is not like anyone you’ve ever known. “You have never been in love before and so you don’t know for certain if you are,” she writes. Her narration in the second person insists that we stop peering down at this young woman and begin, instead, to imagine ourselves as her. This sort of super-duper-cleverness can start to feel like you’re being force-fed eight pounds of cotton candy, which makes Zevin’s success all the more impressive. The most radical chapter, though, is constructed as a choose-your-own-Īdventure story. And yet another contains only the chatty emails of a precocious 13-year-old girl. Another section lets us see the life of that congressman’s long-suffering wife on the occasion of their 30th wedding anniversary. One takes us into Aviva’s future when the story of her affair with a much older, married congressman is just a punchline that people barely remember. The other sections are equally engaging, though in entirely different ways. “Competitive gardening? Burying the last woman he dated?” That comic tone persists even as Rachel shifts to the scandal that rocked Florida, but the real love she feels for her daughter is what gives this section its poignancy and power. “I mean, what was he doing before he came on this date?” she asks. Her second gentleman caller had distractingly dirty fingernails. Rachel begins not with her daughter’s famous romantic calamity but with stories about her own late-in-life online-dating travails. The first section is a monologue by Aviva’s mother, who’s so chatty, funny and confidential that I felt like we were getting our nails done together. That structure rotates the scandal in curious ways, and it also shows off just what a clever ventriloquist Zevin is. Her novel comes to us in five distinct parts, each focusing on a different woman affected by Avivagate. Which is what makes Zevin’s clever approach to this story so appealing. blah, blah, blah.īut you know all that, and the last thing anyone wants is to be dragged through the Starr Report again, one cigar at a time. Aviva is not seriously injured, but the resultant publicity ruins her life, while the congressman walks away with apologies for any pain that his poor judgment may have caused his family or the good people of.
With a nod to Chappaquiddick, their relationship is exposed when they’re involved in a car accident. “Young Jane Young” takes place in Florida, where a 20-year-old intern named Aviva has an affair with a handsome congressman, whom she describes in an anonymous and largely ignored blog.
Fikry,” has dramatically streamlined the complications of that byzantine political scandal. Zevin, the author of several novels for adults and young people, including “The Storied Life of A.J. I’d like to think that we also have a countervailing appetite for thoughtful stories about female persistence and success, which is why I’m excited about Gabrielle Zevin’s “Young Jane Young.” No matter what your definition of “is” is, this is a redemptive novel inspired by the Lewinsky ordeal. “As the social media pile-ons and hate-reads keep on coming,” she writes, “it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we have a vast and insatiable appetite for specifically female ruin and suffering.” Doyle points out that the practice long predates Twitter (Consider that hussy Mary Wollstonecraft!), but she demonstrates just how efficiently the latest technology fuels our misogynistic impulses. Last year, Sady Doyle published an incisive book of cultural criticism called “Trainwreck,” about the way women’s lives are “stolen and weaponized” by ravenous media outlets and their insatiable consumers. Surely, there will come a time when no one associates Lewinsky’s name with anything unsavory - after all, who now recognizes Nan Britton? (For that matter, who now recognizes Warren Harding?) But we’re not there yet, and the residue of slut-shaming is depressingly persistent. The first time that kids born during the Monica Lewinsky scandal were old enough to vote in a presidential election, their choices were Bill Clinton’s wife and a former beauty pageant owner who bragged about sexually assaulting women.