New York Review of Books Review

CAROLINE LEAVITT'S NOVELS often Start off with a bizarre bang, putting the reader in an instant chokehold. Two women separately fleeing their families collide in an accident on a foggy highway, and only one survives - then falls in love with the dead woman's husband. A man meets a psychic in New York, plans to marry her and brings his daughter to meet her, but dies unexpectedly, leaving his fiancée and daughter to stitch up the tatters of what might have been their new life. In a Leavitt novel, people often have secrets; adoptions can go horribly wrong; the medical diagnosis is apt to be dire. And it all makes for dramatic - often absorbing - popular fiction. "Cruel Beautiful World" starts out no differently. We're in suburban Boston in 1969, and 16-year-old Lucy is in love with William, her 30-year-old high school teacher, who doesn't believe in grades ("Einstein flunked math") and hands out antiwar literature. On Page 1, we learn that they're having an affair and she's going to abandon her family (her sister, Charlotte, and her adoptive mother, Iris, who raised both girls after their parents died) to live with William in rural Pennsylvania. There she will polish her short stories, and he will start a new job at a school with no grades, no curriculum and no desks. Just, one presumes, a lot of beanbag chairs and Indian bedspreads. The catch is that Lucy must remain in hiding for two years until she turns 18 and can marry William. Oh, joy! After their departure, surprise : Charming Scamp William turns into Grumpy Feckless Hippie William. Upon arriving at their squalid, isolated quarters, he informs her that she's to care for their chickens (they came free with the house), grow their vegetables and prepare their meals. On a trip to the distant grocery store, she reaches for a packet of hamburger meat and William chides her: They are now vegetarians. She wants ice cream; he says they (really, she) can learn to make their own. He controls the cash. Months stretch into a year, and her dreams of a G.E.D. and his promise to teach her to drive are all postponed. The plot races through several breathtaking leaps and turns involving the truth about Lucy's parentage, her eventual return to the world through a job at a farm stand and her relationship with the young widower who owns the farm. Occasional references to the Manson family evoke the tense mood of the early 1970 s. Suffice it to say, things don't go well. William begins to grow violent and now keeps a gun in the house. Leavitt's novel has the tone of a family chronicle; her readers will expect to immerse themselves in her characters' domestic snarls and scandals - grief, love, betrayal, redemption, everything that goes into a popular, zesty page-turner. But there's a difference in "Cruel Beautiful World." Sure, there are the twisty and compelling touches, but the dark reality here is that William is a sexual predator who essentially kidnaps a girl and holds her in seclusion, a hippie Ariel Castro who sexually enslaves his former pupil. Recently, the news has been full of stories about children who have been raped, even murdered, and at first I wrote off my aversion to "Cruel Beautiful World" as a timing issue. But the rest of the novel - with its reams of psych-speak dialogue ("You have to let it go - you have to open yourself up") and Leavitt's repositioning of William as a victim suddenly worthy of pity - seemed mawkish. And that may be the most shocking and bizarre aspect of all. A 16-year-old student falls dangerously in love with her 30-year-old English teacher. ALEX KUCZYNSKI is the author of "Beauty Junkies."