The characters themselves all seem lost when it comes to controlling their lives, but they are, at least dimly aware of what sustains them. Martha is knowing, but is she knowing enough to be seduced and not just manipulated? And if she is being seduced - or seducing for that matter - how far will she and Mr. The book hovers just above that difference. Manipulation, on the other hand, generally requires a party wholly innocent of the motivations of the manipulator. The difference between seduction and manipulation is really a difference between uncertainty and innocence: When we’re being seduced, we’re not, in general, unaware of the seduction itself, but we are often uncertain as to whether or not we’ll give into it. If you didn’t have any such proclivities in your late teens, you might think she’s merely been manipulated, that she’s being taken advantage of, and that she can’t know what she’s getting herself into. Since, when I was sixteen, I wanted to sleep with plenty of men in their thirties, the aforementioned scene of ball-licking holds an erotic charge not overwhelmed by other feelings, namely that something wrong and hopeless is happening.

Booker kisses Martha one evening (or does she kiss him?), and when the kiss inevitably leads to more and more with each meeting, we know things won’t end well. Sensing her boredom and feeling theirs, the Bookers take Martha in, spending what could either seem to be too much time with her or just enough rescuing her or using her. Booker walk in all witty and worldly, just in from England and in their thirties, their presence signals a way of life outside Martha’s own. She knows that thing aren’t all all right. Martha is also clever in a way that makes her world even more painful. Her father is a miserable maniac (echoing the father in Bukowski’s Ham on Rye so closely, one wonders if Taylor took inspiration from that book). Booker - initially a friend of her mother’s. Martha, who lives a small life in what feels like an unlucky Australian town, falls in love with Mr. Though left, by the author, to our own devices, I suspect that any reader venturing into Cory Taylor’s novel of intergenerational love will find his or her direction quite early on, when its sixteen year-old protagonist, Martha, abruptly describes licking her twice-her-age lover’s balls, “the way he liked me to.”

Me and Mr Booker by Cory Taylor