By Daniel Gewertz

An unreliable narrator is a tough row to hoe for a fiction writer, but a narrator who doesn’t quite know what to think — that’s even harder ground to plow.

My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin. Henry Holt and Company, 290 pages.

Daisy Alpert Florin graduated from Dartmouth in 1995. A writer by trade, she waited over a quarter-century to publish her first book — My Last Innocent Year —  a coming-of-age novel inspired by her time in college. Since issues of gender, sex, and social class are at the forefront here, the book promises something more meaty than simple nostalgia. The material surely has had plenty of time to percolate.

In the end, this book’s final pages go way beyond the merely percolated: it scorches and burns. It is clear that men are not the book’s ideal target audience. But, despite enjoying much of this novel, I had to wonder if men were not meant to read My Last Innocent Year at all.

Chapter one sets up a sexual situation perfectly pitched for 2023. Here’s the first line: “It’s hard to say how I ended up in Zev Neman’s dorm room the night before winter break.” On a bitterly cold December night, English major Isabel Rosen leaves the library of Wilder College and starts chatting with a brashly opinionated fellow, an Israeli ex-soldier whom she’s known casually for over three years. (They had met originally at a Shabbat dinner at the school’s Hillel House.) Isabel has never socialized on purpose with Zev, but often ran into him on campus, engaging in brief, sometimes witty intellectual arguments — friendly enough banter, but not flirtatious. Outside his dormitory he casually asks her if she wants to come in. She shrugs noncommittally, yet enters the dorm.

In his room, Zev kisses and gropes Isabel. She’s nonplussed, but all she manages to say to discourage his advances is, “Could you maybe slow down a little?” Zev replies that he doesn’t think he can. After the hasty sex act is completed, they both chat amiably, wishing each other a good winter break. But Isabel leaves the encounter feeling shaken. Her friend and roommate — a wild feminist agitator named Debra — sees there is something seriously amiss with Isabel’s mood. When told of the sex act, she immediately sees it as rape. Isabel tells her sharply that it was not. Despite the disagreement, Isabel accompanies Debra back to Zev’s dorm floor, Debra with a spray-can of paint in hand. Debra then sprays the word “Rapist” all over Zev’s door. Isabel says nothing. Throughout the scene, Isabel seems baffled, more onlooker than participant … which is very close to how she reacted to the sex.

Though Isabel is both the main actor in this drama as well as our narrator, she refrains from sharing many of her thoughts with the reader in these early pages, which reflects the novelist’s decision to remain ambiguous about this rape/not-rape. It is plain that Isabel is a weak person who cannot say “NO!” to either Zev or Debra. The event is set up as central to the book, and yet it is, in the end, just a hot, tactically effective way to heat up a story that might otherwise have been lukewarm. As narrator, Isabel isn’t long on analysis. College life is well observed, though, from the milquetoast dean of students to the married English professors in the midst of a creepy divorce. The neurotically competitive creative writing class comes to life best. But so many of Isabel’s schoolmates are mentioned along the way that it’s hard to keep them straight; even Kelsey, her best friend, is vaguely defined. Only firebrand Debra stands out: a felonious feminist prankster prone to periods of steep highs and deep depressions.

Florin places most of the action in 1998, three years beyond her own Dartmouth graduation. Presumably this small time-shift was made so the author could use the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton sex scandal as an occasional thematic tic. Yet the Lewinsky affair is dropped into the novel so seldom and so briefly that it lacks resonance. Ultimately, the maneuver seems like an awkward afterthought: a half-baked attempt at literary depth and societal scope. (For a while I thought a loose comparison was being set up between willful Debra and Linda Tripp, the conniving frenemy who decimated Monica’s life. No dice. Instead, we get, in the book’s final pages, a strained comparison between Monica and our narrator.) Other than Lewinskygate, the larger outside world makes no appearances. And men, including Clinton, are cast as the heavies.

So, what makes this novel worth reading? There are two substantial storylines in My Last Innocent Year that reach deeper emotions, and stay true to them. Beginning in chapter two, we see Isabel back home with her father Abe, the owner of Rosen’s Appetizing — the only Jewish non-meat deli left on Manhattan’s lower East Side. (Smoked white fish and salmon, bagels, and cream cheese are the specialties of an “appetizing store.”) Every detail of this Lower Manhattan story seemed so real, I Googled to see if there was a deli with the author’s maiden name in the lower East Side! (There wasn’t.)

Despite his local fame as the owner of a beloved Jewish establishment, Abe isn’t a religious Jew. The Rosens do celebrate Passover at relatives’ homes, but they tend to join the table of the more liberal family members because Abe and Isabel prefer jokes to prayers. Here’s another clue to the nontraditional bent of the Rosens: Isabel addresses her dad as Abe.

Her late mother was a devoted artist, an oil painter, who refused to ever help out in her husband’s store. Despite this arrangement, she was frustrated with her career and her marriage. When Isabel was still in high school her mother contracted cancer and died. “Never marry a man who doesn’t understand you,” was her deathbed advice. During this misery-ridden period of her mother’s decline, Isabel “acted out” by becoming a thief, stealing items and money while visiting the homes of her far richer girlfriends. This is a psychologically plausible turn of events, but Florin has Isabel stealing so much and so often that it stretches the bounds of logic when she gets away with it.

The other finely written segment of the book takes up Isabel’s obsession with her writing professor — a 40-year-old married man — and their subsequent clandestine affair. The quality of Florin’s writing rises sharply here. This is no mean feat, considering that the subject of  love between a female student and a male teacher has become the province of hackneyed romance novels, on the one hand, and feminist polemics, on the other. Isabel’s narration captures the irrepressible essence of first love. (Her lack of guilt regarding her prof’s married status might echo her sense of entitlement about her teenage thievery. In both high school and college Isabel thinks of herself as a poor girl surrounded by the rich.)

Florin makes the furtive love affair more than a fanciful crush. The prose in these segments achieves the artful voice of reflective, sentiment-driven fiction. The professor, a reputable poet, makes Isabel believe in herself as a writer: we are led to believe that if it weren’t for his class, this book wouldn’t exist. The hunky prof is persuasively drawn, and the ego-bruising writing class scenes are also on target. When a fellow student, an ex-lover, derides Isabel as a teacher’s pet — and later accuses her of imagining herself the heroine of a Russian novel — the insults are not far off the mark, but the love and lust Florin dramatizes is persuasive.

But then, after all that good stuff, My Last Innocent Year begins to break down. There is a major plot development that involves another of Isabel’s English profs, this one so enraged by divorce that he becomes a child-stealing maniac on the lam. It’s a sharp turn toward pure melodrama, though it does motivate Isabel to finally exhibit courage and sense: an authentic coming-of-age moment.

Author Daisy Alpert Florin. Photo: Sylvie Rosokoff

An unreliable narrator is a tough row to hoe for a fiction writer, but a narrator who doesn’t quite know what to think — that’s even harder ground to plow. At points, Florin achieves such a likable voice that a more knowing perspective appears to be hovering. But that hope is lost in the last chapter, in which we are brought to the present. Instead of solidifying the story, it unravels the persona of Isabel Rosen. The adult Isabel tells us  — in a rushed, detail-free manner  — about a marriage to a college friend, a minor character of the novel, one Bo Benson, a rich boy who has made no impression upon the reader. They divorce a page later.

Of course, first-person narrators are not required to bring the reader up to the present. But if they do, the grownup narrator has to at least resemble the girl with whom we spent so much time. Florin blows the tale up: marriage, motherhood, and suburban adultery — all of it rushed through in cavalier fashion. The hot affair with a neighbor gets just one sentence: “I fucked him every morning for a year while our kids played…” These events are presented in such a summary series they might as well have been made as bullet points. And why is the novel called My Last Innocent Year? In her senior year of college Isabel ruins the reputation of one male lout without meaning to, and has a hot affair with a married man without destroying his marriage. Does that count as innocent? Or does innocent simply refer to before #me too?

It may be the case that Florin doesn’t want to risk alienating potential young female readers with any non-PC conclusions. So she remains safely ambiguous throughout, and then, in a few final pages, piles on dark beliefs that haven’t been properly led up to.

In her two pages of acknowledgments, Florin thanks 30 women and one man for helping the novel come to fruition. She is also grateful for fellowships devoted to revision. Perhaps it is a matter of too many cooks. Or is it market-savvy advice that led her to wrap things up as dourly as she has? It doesn’t solidify the character we have come to know. In the book’s final pages, Florin gives Isabel large literary success, including a runaway bestseller that was written as a lark. She has attained celebrity status. Fierce young feminists attend Isabel’s book readings attired in the costume of her super-powered heroine, leader of a pack of female killers who murder men who have “demeaned” them.

If you take the narrator at her word, My Last Innocent Year would be the novel Isabel wrote after that make-believe best-seller. Yet the book we have read explicitly states that its narrator did not believe she was raped and did not believe her professor lover did her evil. We never see her wavering in these understandings. Are we to suddenly feel that, at the end, she was an unreliable narrator? Which of the two clashing Isabels are we supposed to believe? The protagonist looks back at Monica Lewinsky and concludes that she was “lucky to have survived. I suppose we all were.” And yet for the bulk of My Last Innocent Year survival has barely been an issue.

For 30 years, Daniel Gewertz wrote about music, theater, and movies for the Boston Herald, among other periodicals. More recently, he’s published personal essays, taught memoir writing, and participated in the local storytelling scene. In the 1970s, at Boston University, he was best known for his Elvis Presley imitation.