Various Men Who Knew Us As Girls

by Cris Mazza

Hester Smith is a woman who always played life near the sidelines—until she decides to rescue a teenage Mexican prostitute. She's up against the border sex trade in Southern California that works like a drug cartel, where the smuggled contraband is teenage girls forced to work as prostitutes in undeveloped canyons just outside suburbia. Law enforcement agencies know it happens, as do investigative journalists, yet the illegal sex trade continues to exist. Most people, comfortable in their homes only miles away, express some brand of shock in the moment they hear about it-and then they go on with their lives, assured there's nothing they can do. While she prepares for the rescue, Hester discovers that the man with whom she almost had an affair-her mentor when she was a 23 year-old student teacher-had been simultaneously having a sexual relationship with a 16 year-old student. Hester mines her own memories of the would-be affair and ultimately tracks down the former 16 year-old. When these two women with a shared scandal in their pasts confront one another, the meeting coincides with the last step necessary to rescue the teenage prostitute Hester has tried to protect.

282 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Cris Mazza is the author of a dozen books of fiction, mostly recently Waterbaby (Soft Skull Press 2007). Her other titles include the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, and the PEN Nelson Algren Award winning How to Leave a Country. She also has a collection of personal essays, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian. Mazza has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and three Illinois Arts Council literary awards. A native of Southern California, Mazza grew up in San Diego County. Currently she lives 50 miles west of Chicago. She is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago "

Reviews

[Monica Lee]

Cris Mazza weaves together the stories of a virgin dork, a teenage siren and a pair of pitiable sex slaves in the novel Various Men Who Knew Us As Girls.

Set in the mid-2000s with vast flashbacks to the late '70s, Various Men reads like a memoir (indeed, the foreword reads, "Because this is a true story, I've had to change all the names, even my own. The rest is true"). The interplay between the different stories is inspired; the juxtapositioning raises questions about desire and harassment and thoroughly muddies the line between socially acceptable and criminal.

Hester is the main character, the late-blooming dork. Hester. Really, I know. Clearly an obvious reference to the adulterous protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. There are probably other literary references that went over my head, and Mazza's choice of Cabaret as a major device might reference decadence and heartbreak or it might mean more than that; I'm not sure.

The whole book reads like that, like there's an inside joke a more astute reader might catch. The conditional verb forms in the flashbacks are awkward and interfere with a compelling narrative, especially in the beginning, but the story climaxes (yes, I just said that) satisfactorily. Though she runs the risk of self-conscious belly button gazing (she admits as much and then writes, "Tell their story, leave your extraneous self-absorption out of it. Please realize: it's too late now), Mazza successfully explores the nature of sensuality, sexuality and pornography, and she refuses to classify any character in black or white, predator or victim.

Like some of its characters, the book's strengths outweigh its weaknesses.

[Valerie]

Who is the victim? Cris Mazza does not let the reader off the hook in this entertaining but deeply unsettling novel about women’s changing sexual lives and sexual expectations from the ’70s to today.