OFFSEASON

An unnamed narrator teaches English literature and searches for her own cathartic resolution at an all-girls boarding school in an East Coast tourist town in the offseason.

Our protagonist is 28 years old and, by her own reckoning, horribly broken. She has never achieved orgasm with a partner, she purges daily, and she has an obsessive crush on a young Josef Stalin (only the first of these three things feels to her like a problem). Her post is temporary, a yearlong replacement for a male teacher on leave for undisclosed but presumably nefarious reasons. Many things have happened for presumably nefarious reasons, the narrator is quick to reassure herself: “Occasionally the thought would enter my mind that the people who had ­violated me, brought me down, and ruined my life may have done so by accident, without sinister intent or design—­but this was the worst thought I had ever had, and each time it emerged I would drag it quickly into the trash file of my brain, because that was my personality.” She’s teaching a course called “The Literature of the City,” the syllabus comprised entirely of Dickens’ Bleak House. In her internal monologue, she ruthlessly profiles her students, while outwardly, she fields their questions with plasticky, erudite, Adderall-fueled cheer. She ruminates on her parents, her mother a Soviet Jew who fled to Israel, her father a white Christian from Texas. She ruminates on pedophilia and ephebophilia, and on the boy who date-raped her in high school. She ruminates on the body, and sex, and the terrifying ramifications of love. Sharp grabs the contemporary fixation on trauma by the horns and rides it to a triumphant and illuminating first-place finish. The narrator’s voice is utterly singular: feverish, gross, assiduously literary, belligerently self-conscious, and, simultaneously, entirely deluded. Spending a few hundred pages with her is like taking a trip in the washing machine on spin cycle.

Startlingly intimate, nauseatingly effective—a brilliant debut.