Books in the Media: Jennette McCurdy’s ‘post-MeToo novel’ is a hit
Following her critical and commercial hit, I’m Glad My Mom Died (Simon & Schuster), former child actor Jennette McCurdy returns to the review pages this week with her debut novel, Half His Age (4th Estate). The novel tells the story of 17-year-old student Waldo, who, as described by the Times’ Sarah Ditum, “lives a life of relentless disappointment” and develops a “rampantly inappropriate crush” on her new creative-writing teacher, Mr Korgy.
“You can think of this as a post-MeToo novel in that it is beadily intelligent about the currents of predation and without feeling the need to deliver lectures,” writes Ditum. “Not only does Waldo want what happens to her (and want it passionately), she also fails to be broken by it. That makes her a bad victim. It also makes her a rather brilliant creation, and I hope McCurdy makes the transition to novelist a permanent one.”
The Guardian’s Priya Elan also reviewed the novel, noting that “McCurdy continues to shake open a Pandora’s box, shedding light on blurred parent-child boundaries and loss of identity due to over-enmeshment, with solid one-liners that feel straight out of a sitcom writers’ room”. The review concluded: “Half His Age is a bleak, often hilarious and uncomfortable triumph that underscores McCurdy’s talent for focusing in on the multilayered nature of trauma and artfully unpicking it, one scab at a time.”
Historian and professor Mark B Smith’s “superb new book”, Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilisation, 1953-1991 (Allen Lane), chronicles “how Sovietism ended badly” for leading figures of the USSR – Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev – following Josef Stalin’s death. According to Simon Heffer at the Telegraph, Exit Stalin “is not merely a political history of a country that struggled for decades before eventually gaining its place as one of the world’s two superpowers” but is a “cultural and social history”, too. Heffer added: “This immensely important book charts a history of idealism that failed because of its inherent lack of liberty, its repressiveness and its corruption.”
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Reporting for the Financial Times, Tony Barber called Exit Stalin a “richly detailed survey of society and culture that gives readers a powerful sense of what it was like to live under communism”. An “impressive book”, Barber concluded that Smith suggests the Russian-Ukrainian war “soon to enter its fifth year – prompts us to see the Soviet collapse not only as the end of one specific era, but as part of the continuum of Russian history”. For the New Statesman’s Owen Hatherley, Exit Stalin is “a book about what happens when a dictatorship liberalises itself without ceasing to be a dictatorship”.
Reuters business columnist Aimee Donnellan’s Off the Scales: The Inside Story of Ozempic and the Race to Cure Obesity (4th Estate), which documents the story behind weight loss and diabetes drug Ozempic, was reviewed by Anjana Ahuja at the Financial Times. Donnellan includes a “nicely brisk narrative, telling the complex story of the pioneering science behind these so-called GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic, and the fierce battle to claim credit”. Ahuja found that the book offers “an easy-to-read smorgasbord of business, social, consumer and science content”, while the Irish Times’ Karlin Lillington described Off the Scales as a “lively and eye-opening tale”.
The narrator in Joanna Kavenna’s Seven (Faber) is working for a “formidable philosopher in Oslo, whose current project is entitled ‘Thinking outside the Box about Thinking outside the Box’” noted Stuart Kelly for the Spectator. This is a novel making “clear that games are neither childish nor mere distractions” as the “Box Philosophers” travel to Greece and find out more about the game, Seven.
“This cerebral picaresque takes in two Seven rivals, an AI trained to play it, gilded celebrities who will pay to find themselves by getting lost and art vandalism,” continued Kelly. Kavenna is a “writer of genuine elegance, intelligence and understated emotions”, the review concluded. Writing for the Guardian, AK Blakemore called Seven a “slim, absurdist novel, but chunky with ideas”, adding: “Of all the genres Kavenna has worked within – or, more accurately, vexed the boundaries of – Seven (Or, How to Play a Game Without Rules) is probably closest to an academic satire.”
