![]() ![]() ![]() But with her youthful recklessness, Coote’s turbocharged nymphet is, disturbingly, quite innocent too. Is Coote suggesting, God forbid, that the grown-up is the innocent in this lopsided pas de deux? Perhaps. It became my delicate business to seem modest, good and vulnerable, while doing my best to encourage your basest instincts.” With adolescent zeal, she micromanages their escapades, while he, helpless to resist, buys them a house in another town. I mixed utterly contrived emotion in with the real ones. ![]() In this way, she resembles her nymphomaniac narrator, who similarly never lets up piling on cliche after cliche and scenario after scenario to keep her lover’s attention: “I choreographed myself. “The simple act of breathing,” she confesses, “became charged with an unbearable eroticism.”Īppropriately enough, the erotic air of “Innocents” threatens to become unbearable, as the forbidden couple’s sex games grow increasingly outre: Coote has nothing against cranking the titillation level up to high and leaving it there. ![]() And yet “Innocents” is really “Lolita” turned upside down, where the obsessive Humbert Humbert is a nameless schoolgirl who draws her own pornography, and whose fetish object is her floppy English prof. It’s like that old Police song, except that, unlike Sting, Cathy Coote, an Australian novelist who wrote this book when she was all of 19, manages to avoid any clunky allusions to Nabokov. ![]()
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