Unsafe Sex

College Girl
By Patricia Weitz
Riverhead, 328 pages, $24.95

College girls know not what they do, or whom they do it with. So we keep hearing, anyway: Most recently, a New York Times Op-Ed introducing the concept of “hooking up” to old people informed us that girls want relationships but guys don’t. Other fretful accounts insist that even if girls think they don’t want relationships, they actually do, since “hookup culture” limits their options to outright rape, “gray rape” and crummy sex. Silly girls! They think they’re like boys, whose decisions are always made freely, but actually they’re just sexy robots.

Into this perilous world trots Natalie Bloom, studious virgin and narrator of Patricia Weitz’s College Girl. That bad things are in store for Natalie is immediately evident from the creepy “snapshot” by which she introduces herself: hazel eyes, brown hair, “symmetrical” lips. In their terse anonymity, the details recall a police report. (The only girls ever said to have hazel eyes are girls who have gone missing.) The list goes on: “crooked bottom teeth,” dry elbows, poor posture attributed to “a mild case of scoliosis.” These are not features but clues, and Natalie isn’t just a college girl—she’s a victim.

Like Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, Ms. Weitz’s debut novel about an outsider looking in positions itself somewhere between chick lit and serious lit that might appeal to chicks. But while Ms. Sittenfeld’s heroine was a keen taxonomist of adolescent longing, engaged by the world and therefore engaging herself, Natalie is a dull-eyed solipsist.

A working-class transfer student, Natalie is isolated from her UConn classmates by circumstance—and by choice—until she meets Patrick, a wealthy pothead. Because Natalie is shy, Patrick assumes she’s interesting; because Patrick wants to be a writer, Natalie assumes he’s smart. Both are wrong. When he says, “Ayn Rand is where it’s at,” you know for sure that Patrick is a jerk.

Predictable and workmanlike (Ms. Weitz favors the needlessly dramatic fragment sentence: “I opened the door and the dog trotted in happily. Gratefully. Wagging its tail”), College Girl is nevertheless engrossing, propelled by Natalie’s obsessive fear of her own body and the bodies of others. In Natalie’s world, only two kinds of sex exist: very bad, as indicated by a rape on campus, and less bad. “Rituals surrounding male-female attraction” revolt her. She hates her breasts. She doesn’t want to be touched. Walking in on her roommate having sex is like hearing a “grotesque, rippling fart.”

What’s remarkable about College Girl is that Natalie’s fear—sex is gross and scary—turns out to be true. Her Patrick-induced decline is so unrelenting as to be cartoonish (failed tests, car crashes). It’s the opposite of pretty much every coming-of-age novel ever written: Natalie’s beliefs are not thwarted or transformed by her experience in the world; instead, her experiences simply confirm her beliefs. At the end of the novel, she’s still frightened by her own arousal, which she regards as “unsavory” as a “rotten banana.”

In the campus setting Ms. Weitz has fashioned, to be antagonized by desire is a perfectly rational way to respond to the world and the people who live in it. After “perverse” nights spent kissing boys, Natalie tells her roommate, Jennifer, “I don’t know how you can’t feel disgusting.” Jennifer soon agrees: Kissing boys is disgusting! The characters who aren’t anxious about sex, it’s implied, should be: One is a “mistress”; another capers around naked with her brother.

While Ms. Weitz reserves her most striking similes for descriptions of bodily humiliation—after sex, Natalie feels like a “used condom”—language fails the author when it comes to pleasure. Early on, one girl refers to a boy’s orgasm as “happiness.” Later, Natalie’s undemanding new boyfriend tells her he loves her, and proceeds to perform oral sex on her. “Warmth” spreads through her body, “filling it with happiness. Ardent, insane happiness.” Ms. Weitz allows Natalie sexual satisfaction—but only under essentially chivalric conditions that deny the reality of desire. Girls, take note: Both your happiness and “happiness” are contingent upon three little words.

With its reductive ideas about the nature of female desire, delivered in simplistic prose, College Girl condescends to girls, both its characters and its presumed audience. It seems that as far as Ms. Weitz is concerned, our interpretative skills are defective: We can’t make sense of complicated sentences, just like we can’t negotiate the knotted nuances of adult relationships.

A long time ago, another girl named Bloom (yes, Natalie reads Ulysses to impress Patrick, and no, of course she doesn’t like it) said, “Yes I will,” and it was a really long sentence, but we went along with it! We agreed. Yes to experience, yes to the words on the page and yes to all those living bodies in the world. But apparently all that connecting with other people went badly, and now we know better. We protect ourselves. At the end of College Girl, Patrick invites Natalie to a party. “I can’t,” she says. Those are her final words.