The Lookback Window

March 1, 2023

For three years, Dylan was a victim of sex trafficking, with his abuser, Vincent, promising to marry him when he turned 18. As an adult, he's managed to build a life for himself with his fianc�, Moans, but then the newly passed Child Victims Act grants him the right to sue Vincent. Is that the sort of justice he wants, and can he bear revisiting the past? Timely. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 15, 2023
A young man seeks closure--or is it revenge?--after a childhood of sexual abuse. Dylan, the narrator of Hertz's sharp, candid debut novel, is a heavily tattooed 26-year-old gay New Yorker who, as the story opens, seeks normalcy but finds it elusive. He's honeymooning in Florida with a decent man, Moans, and though Dylan struggles to keep his promiscuity in check, he's in a better place than he was during the three years he spent--beginning at age 14--being raped, drugged, trafficked, and used in child pornography by a man named Vincent. He's forced to reconsider his past, though, with the passage of the Child Victims Act, which extends the statute of limitations on childhood sexual abuse. But his "lookback period" to press charges is only one year, prompting a variety of stressors: Difficult sessions with his therapist, an attempted confrontation with his pedophiliac abuser, temptations to feed his drug and sex addictions, and lawyers uninterested in taking his case. (The law prompts action against deep-pocketed churches and other institutions; Dylan's situation is less appealing.) Dylan's narration of the degradations he faced as a teenager is unflinching--at times tough to take--and Hertz has a fine command of the anxieties his protagonist faces and why simple solutions are hard to find. But within this unique milieu are some common first-novel issues: Dylan's narration strives for a kind of hard-won stoicism but often reads as flat; the characterizations of Moans and other secondary characters (including another potential love interest) are relatively thin; and plotwise the novel cycles from a memory of abuse to self-sabotage to desperate gestures of love and affection. Hertz's talent for evoking the horrors and consequences of abuse runs deep, but the effect is of a short story stretched past its limits. A promising debut seeking storytelling to match the trauma it evokes.

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June 26, 2023
A young gay man begins to reckon with his adolescent trauma in debut novelist Hertz’s scorching portrait of rage and recovery. Dylan, 26, lives in New York City, where he’s about to start graduate school and is engaged to his boyfriend, Moans. But the thing looming largest in Dylan’s mind is the recent passage of the Child Victims Act, which grants sexual assault victims a one-year window to file a civil suit against their attackers in cases where the statute of limitations has already passed. When Dylan was 14 and growing up in a suburb outside the city, he met 19-year-old Vincent, who, after starting a violent sexual relationship with Dylan and introducing him to crystal meth, made and sold child pornography of him, in addition to pimping him out to other men in the area. It’s a past that Dylan struggles to disclose to his friends and to Moans, even with the help of his therapist, Matan. He also has a hard time finding a willing lawyer, given the scant physical evidence, which prompts him in the third act to risk tracking down one of his rapists. The prose is remarkable, alternating from lush sensuality to unsparing brutality to quick cutting asides (Dylan describes Matan, a pale graying man, as an “early dinner, Lincoln Center type of gay”). This marks the arrival of a vital new talent.

June 1, 2023

DEBUT In January of 2019, lawmakers in New York state passed the landmark Child Victims Act, which lifted the statute of limitations on child sex abuse to give survivors a so-called "lookback window" of one year to sue their abusers, regardless of age or when the crimes occurred. Hertz's debut poignantly explores the excruciating, double-edged implications of this opportunity for a young New Yorker named Dylan who was abused at the hands of many men while in his early teens. At the beginning of the novel, Dylan is on the cusp of marriage to his boyfriend and with it, the possibility of a more stable life, but the trauma of his abuse has never left him, and his efforts to numb the pain threaten to destroy his future. As Dylan passively follows the cases of other survivors who have stepped forward, he begins to confront his own abuse as he contemplates how to pursue justice in his case. VERDICT This forceful, necessary novel, which includes graphic descriptions of sexual assault, depicts the often silent suffering and unfathomable effects of sexual abuse. Readers of Garth Greenwell or Eimear McBride will find it well worth diving into.--Colin Chappell

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