My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Harcover: 384 pgs
Publisher: William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollins 2020)
Purchase @ HarperCollins
Publisher: William Morrow (an imprint of HarperCollins 2020)
Purchase @ HarperCollins
Review by Rachel Stempel.
Lauded by industry giants Gillian Flynn and Stephen King, Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut novel My Dark Vanessa is an unnerving masterpiece. Alternating between protagonist Vanessa Wye’s teenage years as a fringe student at an elite boarding school and her dead-end hospitality career at 32, the reader is invited to jump to some initial conclusions. Part of the novel’s effect requires us to do so, to make unsolicited judgments about why someone ostensibly so self-aware can be in arrested development, and later, how one so clearly a victim can so confidently denounce the label.
My Dark Vanessa is quintessentially a #MeToo novel but not because the movement is the driving force of Vanessa’s reconsideration of what she dubbed an illicit affair between her 15-year-old self and the 42-year-old Jacob Strane, an English teacher at the fictional Browick. It’s a comprehensive exposé of the tenuous nature of victimhood—who gets to claim the title and who gets to dole it out—and how AFAB, femme-identifying individuals are conditioned to be made complicit in the structural violence against them. Jacob Strane is undeniably a villain, if you can even apply conventional narrative logic to character dynamics so close to our own reality. Education as an institution is also a villain, as is the ambitious reporter who hounds Vanessa for information under the guise of solidarity. Vanessa, herself, feels villainous at times, writing off her younger coworker’s wariness of an intoxicated male customer as attention-seeking.
Most notable of Russell’s achievements in this debut is her mastery of the aesthetics of discomfort. Her narrative pacing confronts the reader with the same stomach-churning memories Vanessa is reliving. Russell challenges our expectations of a victim narrative by resisting a readerly approach that would let us absorb her anger, upset, and confusion without showing us where it started. Russell doesn’t allow us the luxury of ignorance. The world she has built is one too close for comfort and is one that makes us reconsider the intricacies of consent on and off the page, aptly exemplifying the realities of the novel’s dedication: “For the real-life Dolores Hazes and Vanessa Wyes whose stories have not been heard, believed, or understood.”
Before its release, My Dark Vanessa made headlines for less celebratory reasons in the fresh aftermath of the American Dirt controversy. Latinx writer Wendy C. Ortiz noted on Twitter that My Dark Vanessa was eerily similar to her own memoir, Excavation, for which Ortiz struggled to find a publisher until 2014 (Future Tense Books, available for purchase through the publisher’s website). It was not an accusation of plagiarism, though the now infamous Twitter thread was decontextualized to be (let the record show Ortiz never said the word “plagiarism” and excerpts of My Dark Vanessa date back to Russell’s LiveJournal presence in 2011). Ortiz was instead calling out the publishing industry’s gatekeeping of trauma stories. Who can identify as a victim and who doles out the label, again, enters different territory in an industry historically white, cis, and straight. Ortiz challenges us to think more critically about who is given the green light to tell these stories, which is not to say My Dark Vanessa isn’t an important read.
Lauded by industry giants Gillian Flynn and Stephen King, Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut novel My Dark Vanessa is an unnerving masterpiece. Alternating between protagonist Vanessa Wye’s teenage years as a fringe student at an elite boarding school and her dead-end hospitality career at 32, the reader is invited to jump to some initial conclusions. Part of the novel’s effect requires us to do so, to make unsolicited judgments about why someone ostensibly so self-aware can be in arrested development, and later, how one so clearly a victim can so confidently denounce the label.
My Dark Vanessa is quintessentially a #MeToo novel but not because the movement is the driving force of Vanessa’s reconsideration of what she dubbed an illicit affair between her 15-year-old self and the 42-year-old Jacob Strane, an English teacher at the fictional Browick. It’s a comprehensive exposé of the tenuous nature of victimhood—who gets to claim the title and who gets to dole it out—and how AFAB, femme-identifying individuals are conditioned to be made complicit in the structural violence against them. Jacob Strane is undeniably a villain, if you can even apply conventional narrative logic to character dynamics so close to our own reality. Education as an institution is also a villain, as is the ambitious reporter who hounds Vanessa for information under the guise of solidarity. Vanessa, herself, feels villainous at times, writing off her younger coworker’s wariness of an intoxicated male customer as attention-seeking.
Most notable of Russell’s achievements in this debut is her mastery of the aesthetics of discomfort. Her narrative pacing confronts the reader with the same stomach-churning memories Vanessa is reliving. Russell challenges our expectations of a victim narrative by resisting a readerly approach that would let us absorb her anger, upset, and confusion without showing us where it started. Russell doesn’t allow us the luxury of ignorance. The world she has built is one too close for comfort and is one that makes us reconsider the intricacies of consent on and off the page, aptly exemplifying the realities of the novel’s dedication: “For the real-life Dolores Hazes and Vanessa Wyes whose stories have not been heard, believed, or understood.”
Before its release, My Dark Vanessa made headlines for less celebratory reasons in the fresh aftermath of the American Dirt controversy. Latinx writer Wendy C. Ortiz noted on Twitter that My Dark Vanessa was eerily similar to her own memoir, Excavation, for which Ortiz struggled to find a publisher until 2014 (Future Tense Books, available for purchase through the publisher’s website). It was not an accusation of plagiarism, though the now infamous Twitter thread was decontextualized to be (let the record show Ortiz never said the word “plagiarism” and excerpts of My Dark Vanessa date back to Russell’s LiveJournal presence in 2011). Ortiz was instead calling out the publishing industry’s gatekeeping of trauma stories. Who can identify as a victim and who doles out the label, again, enters different territory in an industry historically white, cis, and straight. Ortiz challenges us to think more critically about who is given the green light to tell these stories, which is not to say My Dark Vanessa isn’t an important read.
Kate Elizabeth Russell is originally from eastern Maine. She holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Kansas and an MFA from Indiana University. My Dark Vanessa is her first novel.
