My Last Innocent Year

In December 1997, Isabel Rosen, a 21-year-old senior and English major at Wilder College in New Hampshire, follows a fellow student named Zev Neman back to his dorm room after they bump into each other at the library. Isabel has known Zev since freshman year, when they bonded over their shared Jewish backgrounds at a Shabbat dinner hosted by Hillel House, Wilder's Jewish student center. In his room, she discovers he has a girlfriend in Israel he never mentioned. Zev begins kissing her, and despite her discomfort and lack of arousal, Isabel does not stop him. She asks him to slow down; he says he cannot. The sex is uncomfortable and one-sided, and Isabel mentally dissociates throughout. Afterward, she returns to her room, where her roommate Debra Moscowitz is waiting. Isabel struggles to articulate what happened, and Debra insists that Zev raped her. Isabel resists the label but cannot fully reject it either. Debra's anger takes over: She pulls out a can of spray paint, leads Isabel back to Zev's dorm, and writes "rapist" across his door. Zev opens the door and confronts them with hurt and disbelief. Isabel flees.

Isabel is the daughter of Abe Rosen, who runs Rosen's Appetizing, a smoked fish and dairy shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Her mother, Vivian, was a painter who died of cancer when Isabel was 17. Isabel's closest friends at Wilder include Debra, a fiery feminist activist, and Kelsey, a fellow senior. Isabel spends winter break working at her father's store, worrying about consequences from the spray-painting incident.

When Isabel returns to campus in January 1998, she and Debra are summoned by Dean Hansen. Hansen tells Isabel that Zev described their encounter as consensual and does not want to press vandalism charges. He asks Isabel directly whether an assault occurred. Isabel denies anything happened and is given the card of a campus counselor. On her way to class, she encounters Joanna Maxwell, the acclaimed novelist and head of the English department, tending to her four-year-old daughter Igraine. Isabel notices a dark bruise at the base of Joanna's neck.

Isabel learns that Joanna is not teaching her senior fiction seminar because she and her husband, Professor Tom Fisher, are getting a divorce. In Joanna's place is Professor R. H. Connelly, a poet-turned-journalist in his 40s who is married to Roxanne Stevenson, a historian in Wilder's history department. Connelly is handsome and charismatic, with a scar on his right hand and a gold wedding band on his left. On the first day of class, he delivers a speech about honesty in writing that electrifies Isabel. During a freewriting exercise about loss, she fills eight pages about her mother. Connelly's gaze lingers on her as class ends.

Tom Fisher, Isabel's thesis adviser, grows increasingly volatile as his divorce intensifies. During a meeting, he erupts into a tirade about sacrificing his career for Joanna's success. One evening, Isabel watches from her dorm window as Tom grabs Joanna by the arm and pushes her into a car, Igraine crying in the back seat.

Isabel's connection with Connelly deepens through class discussions, encounters in the library stacks, and his written feedback on her work. At a party at Joanna and Tom's house, Isabel argues with Andy Dubinski, a fellow student, and retreats to the coat room in tears. Connelly follows her, tells her she is beautiful, and kisses her. Their kiss is interrupted by a crash: Tom has had a breakdown in the kitchen, smashing a gin bottle and cutting his hand. He appears soaking wet, having jumped into the nearby frozen pond. Connelly takes charge, calming Tom and sending the students home.

Days later, Connelly tries to dismiss the kiss as a drunken mistake, but Isabel challenges him, and they kiss again. He establishes rules of absolute secrecy and creates a cover story for her visits to his office. Before they sleep together for the first time in early March, Connelly insists Isabel articulate her desires aloud, explicitly referencing the ambiguity of her night with Zev. He frames this as protection for both of them: "We need to be clear about it now so there are no misunderstandings. Because the stakes are too high" (155). The experience of clearly consensual sex illuminates for Isabel how different it is from what happened with Zev.

Connelly becomes both Isabel's lover and her creative mentor, reading her thesis pages and encouraging her fiction. He urges her to stay in Wilder over the summer to write, discouraging her from taking a job at Get Out!, a listings magazine in New York. Meanwhile, during a visit home for Passover, Abe reveals he borrowed $25,000 in Isabel's name to cover tuition shortfalls, debt he has hidden for over a year. Isabel is furious, and Abe insists she find a job rather than pursue writing without financial security.

At a party later that spring, Zev confronts Isabel one last time, asking whether she truly believes he raped her. Isabel says she does not know. Afterward, she erupts at Debra for having taken over the situation rather than listening to what Isabel actually experienced. Debra admits she has been struggling with her mental health, and the two reconcile.

In May, Tom disappears with Igraine. He was supposed to bring her to his sister's house in Rhode Island but never arrived. The FBI becomes involved, and MISSING posters appear throughout town. One weekend when Roxanne is away, Connelly invites Isabel to his house for the first time. While he sleeps, Isabel searches the house and finds a photograph hidden inside a Bible: Elizabeth McIntosh, a former Wilder student who had been hospitalized for a severe eating disorder, sitting in front of a cabin wearing a crown of daisies. Isabel realizes she is not the only student Connelly has been involved with. She connects keys she saw earlier to the cabin and confronts Connelly. Pressed, he admits Tom called him, and he gave Tom the keys to the cabin. He insists Tom will bring Igraine home and begs Isabel to keep his secret. Before leaving, Isabel steals one of Roxanne's amber earrings, a theft rooted in a pattern of stealing she developed during her mother's illness, driven by shame over her family's poverty.

Isabel agonizes for a day. She recalls her father's advice about mistakes: Ask if it is something you can fix, and if not, ask if it is something you can live with. She walks to a pay phone and calls in an anonymous tip. State police find Igraine in the cabin, severely dehydrated but alive. She tells officers her father left to get firewood days earlier. Tom's body is found at the bottom of a ravine about a mile away. Whether he fell or jumped is never determined.

Isabel accepts the job at Get Out! and prepares to move to New York with Kelsey. Abe comes for graduation and tells Isabel he never wanted her to feel she could not take up space in the world. Isabel gives him the patchwork scarf she has been knitting all year, realizing it was always meant for him, not for Connelly. On graduation day, Connelly approaches Isabel and argues that the power dynamic between them was not as clear-cut as it might seem: "You want to know what I think? I think you knew exactly what you were doing" (286). Isabel does not argue. She watches him walk away.

The novel's final chapters trace Isabel's adult life in compressed form. She marries Bo Benson, a classmate from Wilder, and has a daughter, Alice. She works as a librarian while writing in the afternoons, eventually publishing "This Youthful Heart" as a novel. She later writes Crushgirls, a bestselling novel about female vigilantes inspired by Debra. Her marriage deteriorates; drawn to the secrecy that Connelly taught her to eroticize, she has an affair, and she and Bo divorce.

In January 2017, Roxanne calls to tell Isabel that Connelly died the previous October after driving his car into Corness Pond. Roxanne reveals that after he stopped teaching, his need for admiration found other outlets, a reference to his involvement with students. Isabel later learns that Whitney Shaw, another former Wilder student, and Elizabeth McIntosh were also involved with Connelly. Isabel takes out the amber earring she stole from Roxanne's bathroom, which she has carried alongside her grandmother's Hebrew prayer of protection for nearly 20 years. The novel closes with Isabel dreaming of her younger self, alone and hopeful, her future vast and unknowable. She tries to call out to that girl but cannot think of what to say.