A novel about a 60-year-old professor getting exploited by a self-prostituting graduate student could be a great read. This is a real phenomenon that I observed many times. Not at my current university because we don’t get paid enough and have no power to advance anybody’s career but at other places. I’ve never seen a female professor succumb because zero prestige accrues to a woman who pays a younger man for sexual services. But I’m sure it happens, if extremely rarely and very secretively. For some reason, people think that in such pairings it’s the younger person who gets exploited but in reality the dupe is always the older, paying individual.
In Shriver’s novel, it’s a female professor who purchases a relationship with a much younger male graduate student. This could be an excellent story if the writer showed realistic depictions of academic life and how such relationships usually evolve. But this was Shriver’s first novel, and she was not yet very good at the mechanics of writing. If you’ve read anything by Emma Cline, The Female of the Species is pretty much the opposite of Cline’s writing. Instead of telling a story, Schriver dedicates inordinate amounts of time to vaguely Freudian explorations of the characters’ antecedents. This ends up being extremely boring because nobody really needs an explanation of why somebody is tempted to sleep around for money and perks.
I have no idea why the word female is in the title, given that women are notoriously hypergamous and almost never invest money and reputation into cute boys half their age. I can’t think of any activity more humiliating to a woman than having to pay for sex. Shriver’s female protagonist is not representative of women.
I’m glad I read the novel and grateful to the person who recommended it because I’m interested in Shriver and her trajectory as an author. She grew enormously as a writer in the four decades since her first book.
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