There have always been impressionable young people who fall for older men — teachers and other mentors — and there have always been older men who have taken advantage of these crushes. But rarely has their story been told as thoughtfully as in Daisy Alpert Florin's intelligent and sensuous debut novel, "My Last Innocent Year," a remarkable coming-of-age story that examines sexual politics, power and lust and the sometimes murky nature of romantic encounters.
Florin sets the seduction between Connelly, a professor, and Isabel, his student, on a college campus in New Hampshire during Isabel's senior year. It's the late 1990s and the drama of President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky is unfolding, a backdrop for the questions this novel poses: When is a sexual encounter rape? When is it consensual? Is it possible for there to be something in between? How does power affect relationships? And can power shift?
Isabel is ripe for the picking. She is beautiful but doesn't know it, brilliant but doesn't believe it, lonely and looking for affirmation. Affirmation comes in the form of Connelly, the washed-up (but brilliant and handsome) married adjunct professor who takes over her English writing workshop. Smoldering glances and praise of her talent and intelligence quickly combust into steamy afternoons on the slippery couch in Connelly's dark office.
It doesn't take much to woo her. "I just like to listen to you talk," Connelly tells her, and Isabel blushes. "It felt like the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me," she thinks.
Isabel does not yet understand that while she is on the way up in life, Connelly has already peaked and is on the way down. As her professor, he holds the power, but that is quickly going to change.
The novel is narrated by present-day Isabel, now middle-aged and a successful author looking back on that time. It's an approach that provides perspective and allows the reader to understand that she has come through this safely, if not unscathed. She is OK and she was always going to be OK. "There was, I can see now, a kernel of self-preservation at my center, a belief in myself and my future," she writes. Oh, if only all impressionable young people had such a kernel.
The unfortunate final section, with contemporary Isabel trying to track down Connelly all these years later, serves no real purpose. But those confusing pages do not detract from the power of the rest of the narrative.
This book will be published on Valentine's Day, which seems both appropriate and ironic.
Laurie Hertzel is the Star Tribune's senior editor for books.
My Last Innocent Year
By: Daisy Alpert Florin.
Publisher: Henry Holt, 304 pages, $26.99.
