THE LOOKBACK WINDOW, by Kyle Dillon Hertz
“I didn’t yet have the words for what happened to me,” says Dylan, the narrator of “The Lookback Window,” Kyle Dillon Hertz’s gripping and savagely beautiful debut novel. But he has covered himself with language. There are tattoos all over his body. Only a few can be made out clearly: “PARADISE” on his navel, “NO DEATH” across his collarbone, knucklebangers proclaiming “FOREVER.” People always want to know what they mean, but the meaning isn’t the point. The tattoos “felt like armor,” Dylan says.
All writers are obsessed with language; the good ones tend to be obsessed with its failures. Hertz is of the latter category. Dylan, too. He’s 27, an M.F.A. student living in New York. He knows about the limits of description. For three years, starting when he was 14, he was sexually abused by a man named Vincent, who drugged and raped him and trafficked him to other men who did the same.
These are the words for what happened — but they are hollow approximations of the magnitude of Dylan’s suffering. Other words have failed him too: “You could only say victim so many times before you soured on the word. I preferred the word to survivor, though, which I always thought was for losers. I didn’t need the designer word for a simple act.”
In the decade since the abuse, Dylan has assembled a fragile existence. He has a therapist, a husband. An earlier attempt to seek justice against Vincent was unsuccessful — the police found plenty of evidence, but the statute of limitations had run out. After that disappointment, Dylan focused on one thing: “ensuring I never thought about what happened.”
But now he has no choice. At the outset of the novel, New York State has passed a new law called the Child Victims Act, which greatly extends the statute of limitations for new child victims of sexual abuse. Previously, child victims had until they turned 23 to report being assaulted. (New York actually passed such a law in 2019.) For people who sit in the gap of the old law and the new law — people who don’t qualify for the new law’s definition of “new victims” but who have already aged past the old law’s statute of limitations — there is a one-time exception: a yearlong period when they can bring a civil case against their abusers. A lookback window. That window has opened, and Dylan must peer through it. It’s a grimly effective frame for the narrative, a clever literalization of the trapdoor of trauma, how the facade of the present collapses under the weight of the past.
But “The Lookback Window” is not the courtroom narrative of pain and testimony and justice one might expect from this setup. It is more like a journey into hell. Confronting the past comes with a cost. Driven by a restless, reckless fury, Dylan descends into a world of surreal abjection, of bar fights and drug binges. In doing so, he realizes the word for what he wants: “Not justice. Vengeance.”
At his best, Hertz sheds the trappings of traditional realism, adopting instead a swerving, almost psychedelic style that mirrors the abrupt and mercurial perceptions of a turbulent mind. He follows the worthy example of writers like Jean Rhys, Gary Indiana and Denis Johnson (Dylan’s tattoos reference Johnson’s own debut novel, “Angels”), all of whom have written brilliantly about wounded people in degraded circumstances, salvaging a ferocious humor and a jagged, weary poetry from the wreckage of the world.
“The Lookback Window” is also a novel about the lives of gay men in America today, about sex and marriage and parties on Fire Island, and the varied forms of intimacy and recovery that might be found in such things. Hertz has managed to tell a story of queer healing with all the narrative force of a thriller and the searing fury of an indictment. It’s an achievement of language, of style, in which the process of finding one’s way back to the world is considered at least in part as an act of learning to “speak the unspeakable.” It’s a matter, Hertz seems to say, of finding the right words.
Charlie Lee is an associate editor at Harper’s Magazine.
THE LOOKBACK WINDOW | By Kyle Dillon Hertz | 272 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $26.99