My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

She darts through the story, weaving contradiction, disorienting the reader, lying sometimes, to herself, to her parents, to a subsequent much more upstanding college professor, and yet also not lying. Her ability to make sense of the situation is mitigated by her wishes, and also by her honesty. Her understanding is patchy, comes in flashes, recedes. “I don’t know what I know,” she says several times.

Vanessa is trying to get to the facts while other people - a journalist, her parents, her classmates, her therapist - are trying to uncover facts, too, but the facts themselves shimmer in the sunlight. The book reads like a thriller or mystery story though there is no mystery.

One of the cleverest aspects of the novel is how it resists the facile linear form of revelation it backs up toward insights, runs away from them, sifts through them again, obsesses. She protects the idea of their being in love because she needs it.Īfter Strane is accused by a more recent student on social media, Vanessa is cornered: She faces or almost faces the ways she has been deluding herself, and then she deludes herself again. When she finds out he betrayed her at a crucial moment. When he threatens that she will have to go into foster care if she tells anyone. When he continues to have sex with her for the first time even though she is crying. When Vanessa sees Strane shove her dog off the couch. Vanessa says, “I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.” He tried so hard to be good.” The reader sees early on that she is misclassifying her own experience, that it got filed erroneously in her mind, and watches helplessly as the story unfolds. The adult Vanessa is a classic unreliable narrator, and as she is reporting the sexual entanglement the reader becomes queasily aware of this. He shows her the lines of “Pale Fire” referenced in the title: “Come and be worshiped, come and be caressed,/My dark Vanessa.” He gives her Sylvia Plath and his underlined, annotated copy of “Lolita.” He puts his hand on her leg under a desk. Her 42-year-old English teacher, Jacob Strane, tells her she has hair the color of maple leaves. Vanessa Wye is a lonely, bookish 15-year-old on scholarship at an elite boarding school in Maine. In her clever, unsettling debut novel, “My Dark Vanessa,” Kate Elizabeth Russell offers a creepy account of abuse and an overwrought teenage girl’s love story at the same time one is superimposed on the other.

MY DARK VANESSA By Kate Elizabeth Russell

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell