30 The New York Review
the degrading things she does to keep
the men’s attention off her niece. Autje
and Neitje trade sex to save old Greta’s
horses, arguing that their virginity is
already lost. The belladonna spray the
rapists used to anesthetize their victims
makes a startling reappearance.
Revelations snowball over the course
of the deliberations, including the
extent of the narrator’s despair and
hints of the bishop’s involvement in the
rapes. But the novel ends on a note of
terrifying hope so pure and desperate
and idealistic that it’s almost unbear-
able. The humility of the novel’s title
belies the extraordinary ambition of its
characters, who, reeling from trauma,
sit, talk, and chart out a future within
two days.
Rachel Cline’s The Question Author-
ity examines a male predator from the
opposite end of the ideological spec-
trum. While the Mennonites are con-
servative, Bob Rasmussen, a middle
school teacher in the 1970s, was the
kind of hippie-ish lefty who wore a
“Question Authority” button. He tried
to construe molesting his students—
and pitting them against one another
for his favors—as teaching them. The
middle-aged narrator, a former student
of his named Nora, is mourning her
mother’s death and gracelessly inhabit-
ing the impossibly expensive Brooklyn
Heights apartment she inherited but
can neither sell nor furnish.
She’s stuck. Her options are similarly
circumscribed at her new job at the
Department of Education in Brooklyn,
where her mandate is to settle (not win)
lawsuits. While tasked with settling
a case with a predatory public school
teacher (a “pedo-whatever,” her boss,
Jocelyn, calls him) who’s been caught
once before, Nora asks why. “First off,
they have a union, right?” Jocelyn be-
gins. She notes that no perpetrator is
ever caught in the act, and besides, the
victim is a teenager, “so half the time
they think they’re in love.” “In eighth
grade, my best friend was fucking our
teacher,” Nora thinks. So were several
other girls. When she finally agrees to
try to settle with the offender, she dis-
covers that the lawyer defending him
has the same name as her childhood
best friend.
It’s not a coincidence. The lawyer is
in fact her friend, a girl named Beth
whom Nora loved but with whom she
cut ties. The pain of that separation
haunts the novel, and Nora’s shock at
encountering Beth prompts a reevalu-
ation of that period in 1971 when Ras-
mussen dominated their lives. Beth’s
reasons for pursuing their teacher
make sense: Rasmussen, who gets
some first- person sections in the novel,
is frank and charismatic; he gave his
victims silver bracelets and nicknames.
He knew how to appeal to them, made
inside jokes in the margins of their
homework, told them he knew they
were menstruating.
Over the course of the novel, Nora’s
reasons for cutting Beth off very slowly
coalesce: sometimes it feels like jeal-
ousy or protectiveness, sometimes
disgust, denial, even shame over her
complicity. The breakage is unclean and
festering even thirty-eight years after
the events that drove them apart (the
book is set in February 2009). Where
Women Talking considers coerced
forgiveness, The Question Authority
takes on the ungainly problem of pu-
bescent desire and friendship—and, in
a roundabout way, guilt. “The girls in
Rasmussen’s class had been fully capa-
ble of desire and arousal,” Nora thinks
at one point. “Was Rasmussen a crimi-
nal? Was I harmed? Was Beth? Men
will always desire girls in that madden-
ing stage of beauty.... In any case, I am
fine, unharmed, normal. My decisions
have been my own decisions.”
Rasmussen was caught and lost his
job. He told people he was “in recov-
ery.” But that didn’t end things for Nora,
or for the women who remember him.
Nora finds a Facebook thread in which
classmates who’d been victimized by
Rasmussen are discussing whether to
join a lawsuit. “What I learned in those
days was to be very, extremely wary of
leftish males with a cause,” one writes.
“He manipulated all of us! When I hear
bullshit like, well, it was a small price
to pay for learning to think indepen-
dently (this, of course, only from the
un-raped), I am speechless.” “I didn’t
have birth control,” one writes in the
thread. “U?” “Were you pregnant??”
“Yea, I had no idea it was rape then.”
“We made cookies after. In his house.”
Glimmering around the edges of this
gaunt and lonely novel is the hope that
Nora and Beth can reconcile thanks
to the shared past that also divided
them. When Nora reconnects with
Beth, she finds her singularly unshat-
tered—shopping for nice things, casual
about a divorce and her son—and dis-
covers that Beth does not see Rasmus-
sen as a problem. She didn’t as a child:
“I’m going to have sex with Rasmus-
sen.” she announced to Nora when they
were kids, adding that she was going to
go to his house and take off her shirt.
Nora asks why; they’d made a pact not
to succumb to his shtick. “Because I
want to,” Beth replies. “I think about
it constantly.”
And she doesn’t now. When the
two women meet up for drinks (now
as opponents in the case concerning
the public school teacher), Nora asks
Beth, who says she dabbled in sex
work, if she holds Rasmussen respon-
sible for anything. Beth tells her not
to be ridiculous, but Nora presses:
“It sounds like there might be a con-
nection, don’t you think? Between
being molested by your teacher as a
fourteen-year-old and becoming a
prostitute?” Beth scoffs, and wonders
if Nora blames the teacher for making
her an old maid. It’s a brittle encoun-
ter, and Beth adds that Nora’s ending
their relationship was worse than any-
thing Rasmussen did: “You want me
to blame Bob but you’re the one who
broke my heart.”There is no consensus about trauma or
justice or even what their past meant,
and it’s painful in ways that Toews’s
novel almost perfectly opposes. Cline
structures The Question Authority by
alternating chapters from a few differ-
ent points of view, including those of
Nora, Rasmussen’s then wife Naomi,
and e-mails between Rasmussen and
a grown-up Beth. It’s a confusing ka-
leidoscope of perspectives until you
realize, alongside Nora, that Beth isn’t
viewing the episode as if over a chasm
of thirty-nine years. It turns out that
she reunited with Rasmussen as an
adult, and married him. “She sleeps in
his bed,” Nora thinks. “He didn’t die,
or go to jail, or fall into a hole in the
earth. And what’s more, he is loved.The ways Beth tried to manipulate me
into settling the case this afternoon
now seem diabolical instead of pa-
thetic.” Is Nora an “old maid” because
of Bob? It’s hard to say; that her life is
emptier without Beth is much clearer.
So is the shocking revelation that Beth
might be using their connection to win
her case and let yet another predator
continue unimpeded.
This is, in other words, less a story
about victim and abuser than of how a
formative friendship failed to survive
the abuser’s interference. In Cline’s
hands, it’s also a story toggling between
self- righteousness and self-doubt. No-
ra’s certainty about what happened is
believably unstable. “Beth and I often
argued,” Nora observes. “In retrospect,the subject seemed to have always been
a version of the same thing: what was
the truth and which one of us under-
stood it?” Our protagonist fancies her-
self the less deluded party: when she
pointed out that the wood paneling in
Beth’s room wasn’t real, Beth wouldn’t
have it. And she credits herself with
seeing through Rasmussen: “I try to
picture how a pedophile operates in a
school. Of course, I already know: he
writes understanding notes in the mar-
gins of the girl’s homework, tells her
she’s pretty, that she can come to him
any time she ever ‘needs to talk.’”
“I have always looked at things a
little too closely,” she says elsewhere—
a self-assessment that gets challenged
more than once over the course of the
novel. Nora misses a great deal. She
didn’t realize that Beth was going to
Hebrew school the entire time they
were friends. She forgot, or blocked
out, that she did not, in fact, wholly
reject Rasmussen’s advances. Beth of-
fers her a photograph as quiet proof,
and Nora’s world turns upside down.
But these conversions do not amount
to repair: Beth’s life falls apart by the
novel’s end, but she and Nora never
reconcile. A brief window opens, dur-
ing which Beth can explain why she
married Rasmussen: “It was more like
finding a lost part of myself,” she tells
Nora one night. “Like he connected
the dots for me between who I am and
who I used to be.” That window closes;
by novel’s end, they’re still on opposite
sides of the courtroom. Beth vanishes
without saying good-bye.The conventional wisdom is that
thirteen-year-olds’ crushes on teachers
do not amount to consent. But that’s
a legal view, not a survivor’s, and The
Question Authority gets weaker the
closer it hews to a legal rather than an
interpersonal perspective. The latter is
messier; teens, for example, tend to be-
lieve in their own agency. Nora strug-
gles to reconcile the real desires of
her younger self (and Beth’s) with the
gaps in her understanding; young Nora
thought, for instance, that Rasmussen’s
“Question Authority” button meant he
was “the authority on all questions.”
She thinks often of a photograph of a
girl named Tamsin—one of Rasmus-
sen’s victims—as “a picture of a girl en-
meshed, trapped, but believing herself
to be a willing volunteer.” The line be-
tween being trapped and being willing
is thin. Nora misremembers that pho-
tograph in a way that turns out to be
significant, but she still tracks Tamsin
down. “I’m so sick of that story,” Tam-
sin says of her former teacher. “I used
to think it defined me, you know?” She
says he raped her while she said “no.”
And she still wears a silver bracelet.
If assault allegations conform to a
bland and legalistic formula, the long
aftermath of a traumatic experience
follows no similar or even knowable
arc. In The Question Authority, trauma
isolates, even when best friends go
through it together. But this is why Me
Too was so surprising; meaning is rela-
tional, and unexpected things happen
when so many lonely people find that
they were not—in their confusion, cu-
riosity, and need for a future conceived
along entirely different lines—alone.
Survivors dealing with a loss of control
over their lives have few ways of nar-
rating the past that restores control and
serenity: to insist on your agency as a
teen is to assume enormous guilt for
your own desire and vulnerability.
This seems to be Beth’s conundrum.
To assume you had no agency is to ac-
cept powerlessness—no easy prospect
either. No wonder Nora erased her
encounter with Rasmussen altogether.
No wonder neither woman can admit
that aspects of her past have shaped
her present; better to compartmental-
ize and split it off to grasp a sense of
sovereignty. The Question Authority
is a hunt for a narrative—an authority,
even—that permits a person to feel au-
tonomous and at peace with herself.
It occurs to me sometimes—when
Me Too is accused of painting with too
broad a brush—that outrage and nu-
ance are hard to sustain simultaneously
because they cancel each other out. A
plea for the one effectively nullifies
the other, and this destructive interfer-
ence gives a false impression. When
grappling with sexual misconduct,
our embattled society tends to turn
one party into a monster too difficult
to imagine and the other into a victim
so damaged that no future seems pos-
sible. This pattern has serious formal
as well as narrative failings. It doesn’t
give much berth to the wide array of
responses people actually have, to both
abuse and its exposure, in the short and
long terms—a range that can include
despair but also other qualities, includ-
ing ambivalence, fury, grief, numbness,
denial, and what I’ll sloppily call hope.
That might not be the precise word for
what Toews’s and Cline’s imaginative
efforts evoke, but I’m grateful for their
deep involvement within these awful
constraints. QRachel Cline on the subway as a
teenager, Brooklyn, circa 1972JoshuaBarnes