June 26, 2023
A young gay man begins to reckon with his adolescent trauma in debut novelist Hertz’s scorching portrait of rage and recovery. Dylan, 26, lives in New York City, where he’s about to start graduate school and is engaged to his boyfriend, Moans. But the thing looming largest in Dylan’s mind is the recent passage of the Child Victims Act, which grants sexual assault victims a one-year window to file a civil suit against their attackers in cases where the statute of limitations has already passed. When Dylan was 14 and growing up in a suburb outside the city, he met 19-year-old Vincent, who, after starting a violent sexual relationship with Dylan and introducing him to crystal meth, made and sold child pornography of him, in addition to pimping him out to other men in the area. It’s a past that Dylan struggles to disclose to his friends and to Moans, even with the help of his therapist, Matan. He also has a hard time finding a willing lawyer, given the scant physical evidence, which prompts him in the third act to risk tracking down one of his rapists. The prose is remarkable, alternating from lush sensuality to unsparing brutality to quick cutting asides (Dylan describes Matan, a pale graying man, as an “early dinner, Lincoln Center type of gay”). This marks the arrival of a vital new talent.