Book Review: American Lit by Jennifer Greidus

Reviewed by Victoria Lilly

Equal parts erotic, dramatic, disturbing, and charming—a coming of age story about escaping the spiral of self-destruction

Ever since his father was killed in a robbery three years ago, Dan has been spiraling away from the outside world and away from his own injured and lonely self. 

High on marijuana virtually all the time, he spends his days in a haze of TV, tennis, and casual sexual encounters—in which he never gives, never kisses. His mother neglects him to an astonishing point, smothering her grief by a string of her own casual lovers. The only thing punctuating Dan’s aimless and dull existence is his newfound obsession with his American Literature teacher, Mr. Stewart. 

Dan’s half-baked plan to seduce his professor becomes diluted by the increasing presence in his life of his classmate Jesse. Jesse dates a friend of Dan’s, deals their clique weed, and as their orbits align ever more closely, Dan becomes attracted to the shy, charming pothead. 

But Jesse isn’t a one-night-stand kind of boy. Becoming entangled with him would force Dan to open himself up, be vulnerable. Compared to such a terror, the dangers of entering a sexual relationship with a man twenty years his senior seem like nothing at all. Of course, Dan’s judgment turns out to be completely off-mark, and a violent spiral ensues.

There is certainly much to praise in American Lit. The novel shines most in the intimate, emotionally charged development of Dan and Jesse’s relationship. Here the callous, selfish, distant part of Daniel’s personality slips, more and more, to show a much more human, fragile, and caring boy. Jesse, too, comes into clear focus, shining among a crowd of drunk and drugged teenagers with his air of soft mystery. 

“I suppose I might be eye-catching, compared with Jesse, who’s seemingly careless about his presentation. He has something though. A lot of unnamable something.”

Another highlight is Daniel’s initial catty game of seducing Mr. Stewart. The trope of a student trying to seduce their teacher is hardly new, but the stark contrast between the pair breathes enough freshness to make the dynamic compelling. Mr. Stewart is all self-control, pedantry, and stubborn coolness. Dan, meanwhile, is not only slovenly (if bright), but also a mess when it comes to his own motivations and feelings. I just wish Dan was eighteen instead of seventeen to remove that readerly discomfort of being underage.

Daniel’s tangled knot of emotions is partially unpacked over the course of the story, but some subtleties fall by the wayside because of the dynamics of the central love triangle. The supporting cast sometimes flash vividly with hints of greater depths, but they sometimes fall flat too. Lack of development of the protagonists’ relationships with the secondary characters is most striking in Daniel’s relationship with his mother. In contrast to the focus given to Dan’s feelings about his dad—and how this plays out in his affair with Mr. Stewart—Daniel’s mother is more of a phantom. Her absence from his life is the point, to be sure, but the narrative makes many starts in the direction of more concretely addressing and resolving this non-relationship but doesn’t quite deliver on it.

The erotic dimension of the book is all-pervasive and displayed in a great variety of forms and function. I don’t mean simply the sex acts themselves, but how their idiosyncrasies say something about the characters. From Daniel’s disinterested casual sex with nameless boys in nightclubs, to the increasingly violent encounters with Mr. Stewart, to the vulnerable and tender sex with Jesse, the author succeeds in wedding the erotic with the psychological and emotional. 

American Lit deftly paints the multifaceted nature of inequality, violence, ambiguity, and desire tied up in abusive relationships. The picture is made all the clearer when juxtaposed to the messy, yet human and equal, relationship between peers. It vividly captures the apathy of the suburban American teen experience and points to all the many pitfalls surrounding youths without healthy and supportive families. American Lit is a hot, depressing, thrilling, and charming read all at once.

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