The blurbs on the cover of Innocents
mention Nabokov’s Lolita, but the resemblance is only superficial.  It is well over twenty years since I read Endless
Love, a novel about an intense, even obsessive relationship between two
teens that was turned into an apparently icky film I never saw, but Cathy
Coote’s Innocents brought that psychosexual novel to mind.  Coote’s anti-heroine is 16-year-old scheming
temptress who remains unnamed, and her prey is one of her teachers, who also
remains unnamed.  The novel is narrated
by her and addressed to him, so the lack of names for the main protagonists does
not seem artificial, and indeed, I didn’t even notice this feature until I
started to write this review.  In
retrospect, it is clear that the device enhances the sense of disturbance the
book manages to convey.  This is
representative of the novel as a whole in that it first seems a relatively
innocent flirtation and developing relationship, but as more details emerge, it
seems increasingly sick.  Her motives
are never entirely clear, but there are hints from the start that she has
unusual preoccupations.  She expresses
her anger towards her high school classmates by drawing pictures of them in
pornographic scenes.  She lives with her
aunt and uncle, but is very distant from them, so when her uncle discovers her
sketchbooks and is horrified by them, she is ready to leave home.  She is fascinated by her new teacher, maybe
because she immediately recognizes that he is attracted to her.  So she sets out to seduce him, playing her
supposed naivety and youth.  Soon she moves
into his house, and he resigns his job to avoid scandal.  As their relationship develops, she takes
the role of a sexually available child, which she knows he finds
irresistible.  She knows he is attracted
to the forbidden and she plays into his fantasy.  She deceives him, and yet maybe this is the only relationship
they can have, because he is not interested in her as an equal or an
adult.  Eventually their life together
spirals out of control, as it was bound to, since she is getting older and she
cannot take on the role of the child forever. 
She writes to him after they have separated with a sense of regret and
pity for him, with no obvious anger for what he ends up doing to her.  Innocents is an uncomfortable read
because it is explicitly sexual and even erotic, yet the narrator is always
detached from her lover, and, ultimately, isolated and vulnerable.  The novel is open to different
interpretations; one could see it as a simple indictment of the duplicitous
ways of women, but it could equally be read as a feminist condemnation of the social
construction of female sexuality and the warped identities available for
women.  At the end, there are few clues
about the girl’s fate, and those that are given are far from clear, so one is
left with a lack of resolution.  It
seems that Coote does not aim to make any argument, and is merely an exploring
an idea.  Judged in those terms, Innocents
is successful, but the examination of the virgin/whole dilemma through the
girl’s perspective leaves many of the important questions unanswered.  

© 2003 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Chair of the Philosophy
Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor of Metapsychology
Online Review.  His main research is on philosophical issues in
medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction