THE LOOKBACK WINDOW

A young man seeks closure—or is it revenge?—after a childhood of sexual abuse.

Dylan, the narrator of Hertz’s sharp, candid debut novel, is a heavily tattooed 26-year-old gay New Yorker who, as the story opens, seeks normalcy but finds it elusive. He’s honeymooning in Florida with a decent man, Moans, and though Dylan struggles to keep his promiscuity in check, he’s in a better place than he was during the three years he spent—beginning at age 14—being raped, drugged, trafficked, and used in child pornography by a man named Vincent. He’s forced to reconsider his past, though, with the passage of the Child Victims Act, which extends the statute of limitations on childhood sexual abuse. But his “lookback period” to press charges is only one year, prompting a variety of stressors: Difficult sessions with his therapist, an attempted confrontation with his pedophiliac abuser, temptations to feed his drug and sex addictions, and lawyers uninterested in taking his case. (The law prompts action against deep-pocketed churches and other institutions; Dylan’s situation is less appealing.) Dylan’s narration of the degradations he faced as a teenager is unflinching—at times tough to take—and Hertz has a fine command of the anxieties his protagonist faces and why simple solutions are hard to find. But within this unique milieu are some common first-novel issues: Dylan’s narration strives for a kind of hard-won stoicism but often reads as flat; the characterizations of Moans and other secondary characters (including another potential love interest) are relatively thin; and plotwise the novel cycles from a memory of abuse to self-sabotage to desperate gestures of love and affection. Hertz’s talent for evoking the horrors and consequences of abuse runs deep, but the effect is of a short story stretched past its limits.

A promising debut seeking storytelling to match the trauma it evokes.