How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

This is such a weird, clumsy accusation-as-deflection by a character who, after his wife left him (“packed her huaraches and her shorty night-gowns and her Glenn Miller records and picked up a flight to Travis”), started fucking a teenager (Inez is seventeen when she and Jack begin their affair: “she smelled of beer and popcorn and Nivea cream”) and began to indulge in a little neocolonial war profiteering (“By September of 1952, when Inez Christian left Honolulu for the first of the four years she had agreed to spend studying art history at Sarah Lawrence, Jack Lovett was in Thailand, setting up what later became the Air Asia Operation”). Of course, like most such apologist literary narratives about the romance of divorced adult men wanting to fuck teenagers, the girl in question is preternaturally cool, mature, and self-possessing.