The novelist Rachel Cline wrote the first page of what’s now described as a MeToo novel nine years before Christine Blasey-Ford testified.
“At last everyone is seeing how ubiquitous this experience is,” Cline, who was born and raised in Brooklyn Heights, says. “It was a moment that had to happen and needs to continue to happen.”
The good, painful, and ambiguous consequences of MeToo are the subjects of Cline’s third novel, “The Question Authority,” which is slated for publication on April 18. The title comes from the well-worn slogan — question authority — that Cline grew up with in the 60s and 70s when she went to an elite prep school. The “Question Authority” button was even worn by her 26-year-old male teacher whose well-known secret was having sex with the seventh and eighth-grade girls he taught.
“We didn’t have a concept that a guy that age could be a pedophile,” Cline says, even as she grew up in very liberal circles where America was occasionally spelled with a K to remember its barbaric tendencies. “That wasn’t a thing. He was just a randy, young dude.”
The Question Authority alternatives between the 1970s and 2009. The protagonist, Nora Buchbinder, has just lost her fortune in the 2008 financial collapse. She reunites with a childhood friend, Beth, to figure out if their eighth-grade teacher could be called her lover or her rapist.
“You have empathy for these girls. You hear these young girls saying this was my choice, I love him and he loves me, and you want to honor their agency, but you know that 30 years down the road they may look at that very differently.”
If the title, The Question Authority, is an odd one, it’s because it reflects the girls’ confusion in experiencing this reality, and their nascent reckoning decades later.
“If you want to get on with your life, and who doesn’t want that, it’s easy to diminish the importance of things that are really stuck deep in your soul.”
Though she wasn’t involved with an older authority figure, the questions of consent, power, and justice have haunted Cline ever since childhood. With the R. Kelly documentary looming large in the background, the question remains just as pressing. Kelly was 27 when he married Aaliyah, then 15.
“There’s almost this evolution in adulthood in your ability to understand what happened to you as a young person. Even in your 20s, you think you’re an adult and you can do all the things an adult can do and you have that intellectual capacity, but your sense of the significance of events in your life, you just lacked the perception to understand what impact something has had on you.”
Cline, the novelist of the critically-lauded “What to Keep” (2003) and “My Liar” (2008), has been churning through the experience her entire life. Though the teacher clearly took advantage of young women, he was also an inspiring figure. Cline credits him with sparking her love of writing.
“This guy was a scoundrel, but he was also a tremendously influential teacher. He taught me to write.”
Her goal with The Question Authority was to see all perspectives of the issue, the benign and the menacing. In the novel, the perpetrator is young and married with children. Cline looks at how his actions impacted that family. Nora considers how the wife may have enabled the young teacher to continue in his abuse of students.
Getting into the head of the perpetrator was essential for Cline; she even writes a couple of chapters from his perspective.
Speaking about the defensive reactions of contemporary figures like Kavanaugh, she said, “If I can get inside the head of the perpetrator, I get it. They feel like they’re just doing what the culture told them to do. It was normative five seconds ago. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the diseases that are part of America.”
Throughout The Question Authority, Cline compels us to face the most pressing questions that MeToo raised: how is inequality truly seen, what does justice look like, what good does questioning authority do when the authority is so skilled at dodging questions?
The Question Authority is published by Red Hen Press on April 18.
