The ObserverFiction This article is more than 10 years oldReviewLolito by Ben Brooks – review
This article is more than 10 years oldA tabloid-baiting story about an internet romance between a 15-year-old boy and a teacher proves surprisingly tameBen Brooks's fifth novel comes lauded by no less an expert on the seamier side of life than Nick Cave, who describes it as "the funniest, most horrible book I've read in years". Given the tabloid-baiting subject matter of its 15-year-old narrator,, the unusually named Etgar, who embarks on a forbidden internet romance with a middle-aged teacher named Macy, it is a surprise that the book is far tamer and less subversive than it had the potential to be.
Brooks is more interested in his protagonist's failed relationship with his long-term girlfriend, Alice, and in the grubby suburban milieu that his characters inhabit, where the drink of choice is White Lightning cider and most of the conversation is about half-remembered films.
It's strange to criticise a book for not being more disturbing, but Brooks's handling of a sensitive and hugely controversial subject is curiously mealy-mouthed. Macy is presented straightforwardly as a good-looking and decent woman who doesn't get involved with Etgar out of paedophilic desires but out of boredom, and the eventual discovery of the affair seems to come about through dramatic necessity rather than logical progression.
Against this, Brooks (still only 21) has a fine ear for the banalities of teenage speech and action, and is excellent at evoking a world where perceived slights and infidelities assume comically magnified proportions, leading to equally comical attempts by the characters to behave in an "adult" fashion; the point being, of course, that Etgar's "adult" behaviour results in an all too predictable comeuppance.
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