We Love to Hate the ‘Bad’ Teacher
The new novel Tampa fuels our national anxiety about public education
CHRIS O'MEARA / AP
Former schoolteacher Debra Lafave, right, arrives with her mother Joyce Beasley for a probation-violation hearing at the Hillsborough County Courthouse in Tampa on Jan. 10, 2008
With her new novel, Tampa, Alissa Nutting has given us American literature’s first psychological exploration of the female pedophile, an account of a Florida middle-school teacher, Celeste Price, who lures two eighth-grade boys into sexual relationships. Price is no Mary Kay Letourneau, who, after serving time in prison, actually married the student she abused when he was only 13 years old. Price is a cold-hearted nymphomaniac who, after feeding her sexual needs, wishes for the deaths of her victims. She is based on Debra Lafave, the real-life Tampa pedophile teacher — and former high school classmate of Nutting’s — who avoided jail time after her lawyer argued she was too beautiful to get locked up.
With its blunt descriptions of adult-teenager sex, Tampa has attracted significant media attention, with Nutting being billed as “the summer’s most controversial author.” Though the writing in Tampa is pedestrian in comparison with Nabokov’s Lolita, the great classic on which it is based, it certainly represents a gutsy attempt by a young, female author to embody a wholly unsympathetic female narrator and to probe the question of whether society lets women essentially get away with crimes for which men ar
Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2013/07/08/we-love-to-hate-the-bad-teacher/#ixzz2YUn62HFA
