YA or STFU

Touch, by Francine Prose

Prose, Francine (2009).  Touch.  NY:  HarperTeen.  272 pages.

This is another one of those books about which I disagree with one of the major review sources–in this case, Booklist–who gave Francine Prose’s third (I think) YA novel a starred review.  Here’s the thing:  I think that, in the case of Prose, the author’s reputation has preceded her.  Prose was nominated for a National Book Award and has received much  critical acclaim for her writing for adults; however, I’m just not sure she’s a good author of YA fiction.  I’ve read her previous two YA books (After [2004] and Bullyville [2008]) and I think that in her latest, Touch, she does what she’s done in the past:  addresses a social issue emerging around contemporary adolescence and tries to simultaneously politicize it and (and I’m not sure this is a word) “gothicize” it.

Touch is the story of fourteen-year-old Massie, a high school student who has always palled around with three male best friends.  Following a disasterous stay with her mother and her mother’s husband in the midwest, Massie returns to her father’s and stepmother’s house and is reunited with her erstwhile buddies.  In her absence, Massie has grown boobs and her friends have discovered their dicks and, after she begins a tentative physical relationship with one of them, the three boys sexually assault her.  Massie, confused about the incident and about her complicity, initially lies about one of the details of her account, but reassures herself that because the three boys also lied–they spread a rumor that she had asked them to touch her and that she wanted them to arrange for more boys to sample her wares–her lie is justified.  The narrative progresses chronologically beginning after the incident and is interspersed with conversations Massie has with her therapist.

As with After and Bullyville, I feel like Touch is a rather dressed up problem novel.  While the novel attempts to capture Massie’s growing confusion as to the truth of her own story–a compelling premise–the stock characters of Massie’s narcissistic stepmother, the hard-assed female lawyer the stepmother hires to sue Massie’s school (the assault happened on a school bus), Massie’s clueless father, and the young stepbrother who seems to be losing his innocence seem more like pawns than three-dimensional characters.  Coupled with a conclusion voiced by a slightly older Massie, looking back at this brief, confusing period in her life, the novel is like one of those spare but supposed-to-be-deep New Yorker short stories that I can never really stomach.

In many ways, Touch reminded me of Sexy (2005), by Joyce Carol Oates.  While I’ve never thought that Sexy was the finest example of Oates’ work, I do feel like she captured the ambiguity of a similar situation with much more menace.  In comparison, Prose’s novel comes in a distinct second place.