My Last Innocent Year: A Novel, by Daisy Alpert Florin

A dry riverbed of consciousness.

A girl from the lower east side goes to a thinly disguised Dartmouth college where a semi-consensual sexual encounter with a fellow student evolves into an entirely consensual adulterous relationship with a professor. My Last Innocent Year is a debut novel by Daisy Alpert Florin, whose writing evidences an enormous potential. The beauty and succinctness of Ms. Florin’s prose demonstrates a budding talent. But her story telling needs some work.

The novel is written in the first person, the narrator being the protagonist Isabel. The plot moves chronologically, although chock full of backstories, from the Zev Neman dorm room incident, just before senior year winter break in 1997, to a point in her womanhood in January 2017, although events after Isabel’s college graduation day in 1998 take place entirely in the novel’s last chapter. That chapter ends, seemingly, in the character’s present day after a metaphoric dream of the protagonist as “a girl in dusty sandals and denim shorts, chipped nail polish and cigarette breath,” about to embark on the journey that has just been recounted to the reader. The story returns to its beginning, it turns out, via a circular path that is at many points illuminating, until the drawn out ending, when it becomes confusing and annoying.

Ms. Florin tells her novel’s story through narrative pauses, some of which contain backstories within backstories. Actually, a reader soon realizes the entire novel is a backstory of sorts, which accounts for many of the editorial reviews and endorsements of My Last Innocent Year alluding to the coming of age genre. But that seems to be too easy a genre categorization: story in first person narration that involves the path taken by a young protagonist to a self-revelation that leads to a better equanimity for her life, what John Truby calls a New Equilibrium. It’s a great genre for selling books, particularly with the semi-consensual-Monica Lewinsky and sleeping-with-a-professor twists as well as hints that it shares a space with Salinger and Fitzgerald. But in terms of literary merit, there is little in the novel that distinguishes it from so many other commercial novels in the category.

My Last Innocent Year uses sex as its common denominator. It’s almost just an audience grab for it doesn’t progress clearly to the protagonist taking a new moral action, which happens during the confrontation with Debra and Zev at a party in Chapter 17 or her decision to break her promise to Connelly in Chapter 20 and report Tom’s location. Other more complex elements of Isabel’s character work to that end: regret, mourning her mother, and feelings of inadequacy, to name a few. These create a desire and the need that propel Isabel’s journey to self-revelation. To give the author the benefit of the doubt, the semi-consensual sex at the beginning of the novel may be the spark that sets the other elements ablaze, but it runs the risk of looking like a trick that insults the reader’s intelligence. There is clever imagery in the protagonist’s revelations that accompany these confrontations: Isabel’s stealing Roxanne’s amber earring, Isabel’s memory of her mother’s advice about knitting, and the rabbi squeezing an entire tube of toothpaste onto a plastic tarp. But the end of the story is too many pages away, the plotline falters, and the narrative drive slows down into a twenty year long piece of telling, not showing.

Would that the novel had ended in Chapter 20 with Isabel’s self-realization and accompanying equilibrium that comes soon after the anonymous tip about Tom’s whereabouts. Or the technique that Ms. Florin had used instead to tell the story was stream of consciousness. It is interesting that in an earlier manuscript, her novel had included a second time line, one that was ultimately extracted from the body of the novel and condensed into the published novel’s last chapter. (See the author’s essay in a 2021 edition of Bookends.) Leaving the second time line infused with the first had the potential of making the bones of a story like that of Mrs. Dalloway. That condensed last chapter in the published novel, unfortunately, turned the coming of age story in My Last Innocent Year into a somewhat flat fictional memoir. It took away the story’s vitality by watering down the moral challenges with the protagonist’s psychological need, including a distracting, and unneeded, opponent. The protagonist’s quest to do the right thing and the final confrontation that leads to self-revelation become obscured by the addition of Chapter 21. That chapter is little more than a nineteen year exposition of a marriage, a child, a divorce and a successful writing career, all of which do little more than reenforce Isabel’s self-revelation in Chapter 20. This exposition certainly gives the publisher good marketing copy, but it sadly diminishes the moments of Florin’s literary talent that peek through the first twenty chapters.

My Last Innocent Year certainly pushes all the buttons necessary to make it a commercial success. Casual readers will delight in its political allusions, its sexual themes, and the happily ever after view of a successful forty year old woman. But serious readers may be disappointed with the novel’s cursory treatment of what they hoped would be the character development of a confused or disconsolate person like Holden Caufield or Jay Gatsby, something that might have made the novel transcend the desiccated fictional memoir that it is.