The Fever
Megan Abbott
303 pp., Little, Brown and Company
First Edition 2014, $26
ISBN 5978-0-316-23105-3
“The first time, you can’t believe how much it hurts.”
This is the first line in Megan Abbott’s book The Fever. Upon reading this, I immediately thought about the big elephant in the room our culture promotes and profits from, yet doesn’t know how to have a “healthy” conversation about: sex. Better yet, teen sex. The line is actually about an HPV vaccination that all female students of Dryden High are required to get. And as the story continues, sex and vaccination were only two of the many complications affecting the Nash family and a small community in Anywhere, U.S.A.
Deenie is the classic smart chick and harbors muddled feelings about her relationships with her friends, particularly Lise. After Lise falls ill with a mysterious condition and later into a coma, Deenie is struck with grief, but also mired in her on survivor’s guilt as other female classmates and friends exhibit symptoms similar to Lise’s (twitching, etc). There can be only one explanation: it’s a contagion from the vaccination. Panic therefore ensues. Meanwhile, Deenie’s brother Eli is a star hockey player who is questioning his thoughts about girls and his role in the hysteria as he is believed to have had a sexual liaison with Lise. Tom, their father and well-liked chemistry teacher, is still reeling from his divorce and struggles to keep up with the madness as the community nearly implodes with terror. But this isn’t even the half of it. Truths about the relationships from girls to boys to girls to girls unravel as secrets come out like cats out of bags.
The book centers around mass hysteria as it pertains to adolescent female sexuality. And while including a “girl magnet” brother who contemplates what it really means to be said magnet and a father coming to grips with being single and how to protect his daughter, the understanding of female sexuality is largely examined while the males get away with being predictable. In that case, everyone’s a stereotype. The beautiful girl is “sexy”, the boys want her, and boys will most certainly be boys. While that is largely true in our culture, I don’t think Abbott is glorifying or legitimizing it. I think she’s holding a magnifying glass to how society shapes female sexuality from adolescence into adulthood and the weight of adhering to that standard. The burden of “appropriate” or “safe” sex/sexuality falls on the female. Think back to the early 90s MTV ads about condom use. Every last one of them was a call for the woman to require the man to have prophylactics. Not one of these commercials insisted that the guy already come prepared. (It’s only been in the last year that I’ve heard a radio ad with a comedian actually calling men out for not being proactive in condom use.) From the HPV vaccine, to Lise’s trist with another student, to Eli’s escapade with a female classmate (or rather the classmate’s escapade with Eli, which Tom never questions after he sees the girl leaving his son’s room), to Deenie’s own dealings with another male student (which she feels guilty about), to Tom’s cheating ex-wife, sexual girls/women are all on display and potentially target practice for society at large.
We all know (at least I hope we do) that boys and girls are taught different things about sex and sexuality. Boys are taught to sow their wild oats while girls are taught to either wait until they get married, but if you require your boyfriend to wait then he’ll cheat, but if you have sex with him then your virginity is in tatters and you’ll have sexual issues when you get married because you're supposed to want to get married and if you don’t then something’s wrong with you. Not to mention the names women and girls are called if they engage in the same kind of and number of sexual gymnastics as their male counterparts. While Abbott isn’t trying to offer an explanation or solution, it is refreshing to see an author present such a well-fleshed out space for what is a complex issue. The girls/women themselves don’t seem to know what to do with their desire. Deenie and Eli’s mother doesn’t know how to communicate with them because of her infidelity, Deenie regrets having sex with a classmate and even thinks the cause of the singularly female illness is because of sexual desire. This all begs the question of what “the fever” actually is. Is it female sexual desire or the furor surrounding it? The cause of the illnessremains under wraps up until the last thirty or so pages. When you come to the realization of what it is, you’ll either find it clever or disappointing. You’ll have to decide. In the meantime, you’ll be taken on quite a well-plotted ride that doesn’t beg you to turn the page, but requires it of you. While the ending falls a little flat and I think the story would have been better told from Deenie and Eli’s point of view sans Tom, I couldn’t escape the murkiness of adolescence that was all too familiar. It seems we never actually graduate from high school and don’t really know how to talk about, think about, or actually have sex. And therein lies the crux: sexuality at any age is a little understood thing. It’s the fever we can never heal from.
If you've read or are currently reading this book, please add your ruminations in the comment section below. I don't want this to be a book club of one! Also, come back on April 15 to join the conversation about the next title: Dante' Aligheri's Inferno. I can't wait to hear what you think!
