![]() ![]() “He was at the very last link of androgyny that puberty would permit him: undeniably male but not man.” Once she convinces Jack to give in, Celeste performs every salacious, graphic sexual act under the sun-almost as if she is committing these brazen acts on him and not with him. “Something in his chin-length blond hair, in the diminutive leanness of his chest, refined for me just what it was about the particular subset of this age group that I found entrancing,” Celeste confesses. In her first year, she obsesses over her chosen target, young Jack Patrick, on whom she ruminates in the most illustrative fashion. She says that the loss of her virginity at age 14 imprinted on her, and she has been working unceasingly as a student teacher to get to the mother lode: a gig as a full-time teacher of eighth-grade boys. Unfortunately for her, Celeste is also deeply, unfixably broken. She’s married to a rich suburban police officer, drives a hot car, and her looks could cause car wrecks. ![]() Our narrator, Celeste Price, looks absolutely harmless on the surface. ![]() In a story that makes Nicholson Baker’s work look hygienic by comparison, Nutting unleashes a devious temptress whose acts of deception are as all-consuming as her incessant masturbatory frenzy. Nutting certainly brought dark overtones to her story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (2010), but even that auspicious debut pales next to the unclean psyche at the heart of her first novel. A middle school teacher in Tampa, Fla., goes to outrageous lengths to hide her voracious sexual appetite for adolescent boys. ![]()
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