‘It’s probably going to ruin me, isn’t it?’ Author Jennifer Belle on her shocking ‘Lolita in reverse’ novel

Jennifer Belle was once one of America’s most lauded new authors. She was barely 28 when, in 1996, her debut novel, Going Down, about a woman who puts herself through college by working as a call girl, was published to global success. New York’s glitziest young writers Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz lined up to praise her, while Madonna snapped up the film rights, enlisting Belle to pen the screenplay herself. This daughter of the noted poet Jill Hoffman had got off to a dream start.

“Madonna was creative and brilliant,” says Belle. “She’d make suggestions for the screenplay, and I would disagree completely, but then I’d suddenly sit up a few days later and think, ‘Oh, of course! She’s 100 per cent right.’ It’s like she had tentacles all over her body, and just did things correctly, which is what an artist has to do.”

Their collective efforts, however, ultimately came to nothing. The film never got made.

“I’ve heard lots of stories as to why,” says Belle. “But in the end I took the deal away from [Madonna] and gave it to someone else, and we parted on bad – or indifferent – terms. She didn’t really need me in her life, but I do consider it one of my greatest experiences. It was a privilege to work with Madonna and,” she adds, impishly, “I hope she options this one, too.”

“This one” is Swanna in Love, Belle’s first novel in 14 years. It’s a brilliantly provocative tale – based at least partly but by no means wholly on her own adolescence – of eight days in the life of the titular Swanna, one hot summer in 1982.

Swanna is 14 years old and at summer camp, when her newly single poetess mother arrives to pick her up, new stoner boyfriend in tow. After collecting her younger brother, they don’t head home to New York but rather repair to an artists’ colony in Vermont that doesn’t permit children. The siblings are left idling in the boyfriend’s truck overnight. Rightly furious, Swanna decides to leave. It’s while planning her escape – and it is pertinent to point out here that this is where autobiography trips over into fiction – that she meets a handsome married father of two, aged 38, and begins an affair.

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Over the following week they become utterly consumed by lust, have a lot of sex and fall impossibly in love. The fact of Swanna’s age – 14, remember (though she does claim to be a little older) – doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem for the man, who is mostly in thrall to his baser instincts. “Does it hurt?” he asks her the first time they sleep together, then kisses her neck and suggests that, “next time will be easier”.

The novel, then, is essentially an inverse Lolita, told from the point of view of a teenage girl who considers herself in charge of the situation when she’s anything but. Brimming with biting humour, it is also likely to offend, and is therefore the perfect vehicle to mark Belle’s belated return to the literary landscape. Running a hand through her raven-black hair, and pursing her bright red lips into a little moue, the 56-year-old offers a tart smile. “It’s probably going to ruin me, isn’t it?” she says. “Because these are pretty outrageous themes, even for someone like me.” She says she’d wanted to write about this particular episode in her life – the summer camp, the wayward mother, the errant boyfriend and his truck – for some time, but realised that the story needed more of a page-turning narrative thrust to it. The “Lolita in reverse” angle came to her in lockdown.

“I’d had a pretty rough experience with my last book [The Seven Year Bitch, 2010], and because I’m not a masochist I didn’t necessarily want to go through that again. But when the pandemic hit, I became ravenous to get it out.” She, her husband, and two children (now 19 and 16), left the city, and moved to upstate New York. Cooped up with her family, she found the cabin fever “horrible”. “So all I wanted to do was write.”

Why had she left it so long between books? Had she felt blocked?

“I wasn’t blocked, because I was writing; I just didn’t feel inspired to publish.”

For someone who displayed such promise, Belle’s literary career has been patchy. She followed Going Down with her 2001 novel High Maintenance, about a woman in Manhattan real estate going through a marriage crisis (think Candace Bushnell by way of Nora Ephron), but her next two novels, Little Stalker and the aforementioned The Seven Year Bitch, didn’t make the same splash, and failed to secure UK publication.

“Look, I was never a particularly provocative writer,” she suggests, as if forgetting that her debut was about a call girl. “Yes, but may I remind you that Going Down didn’t feature any sex in it at all… OK, maybe it was provocative and button-pushing a little, by gentlemanly English standards.” And here she points directly at me, laughing as I blush, “but it may have seemed a little more suggestive simply because I had a smartass American voice that I think you guys like.”

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Either way, Swanna in Love is provocative. It’s a love story that features underage sex, and statutory rape. And the fact that Belle, as author, doesn’t condemn or admonish either of her lead characters’ behaviour, but rather allows the reader to intuit any subsequent fallout, could in itself be somewhat inflammatory. “Absolutely,” she says, nodding her head. “When I delivered the manuscript, I was prepared to make changes if anyone asked me to, because I’m a grown-up, and a professional, and because I wanted outside input.”

Nevertheless, the novel was turned down by every US publisher, the general consensus being that while they liked her writing, they didn’t quite see the book’s “vision”. When it was eventually picked up – by a plucky independent – her editor asked her to write a kind of mission statement, not for public consumption, but simply to explain herself.

“I didn’t want to write a trigger warning at the beginning of the book, because I don’t like that kind of thing, but I think he wanted to know that I wasn’t some kind of nutjob, that I was normal. I’d thought that that would have happened in conversation, over delicious, expensive lunches! I didn’t think I’d have to be writing statements, but, you know, that’s OK. I wrote it with the help of a gender studies chair at a university, someone who reminded me to use phrases such as ‘she has agency over her sexuality’.” Not that this is the sort of language Belle herself would use. “I’m more of a romantic than an activist.”

During her years away from fiction, Belle ran a creative writing workshop. One of her students, Jeanine Cummins, went on to publish in 2020 the novel American Dirt, which became a global sensation. “Her agent submitted her manuscript on a Friday, and got many offers on a Saturday. Who gets offers on a Saturday?”

By the following Monday, Cummins was the hottest new writer around, and swiftly secured a seven-figure deal. The novel, about a young Mexican woman’s plight to cross the US border in pursuit of notional safety, was a critical smash, an Oprah’s Book Club choice, and sold millions. And then it was abruptly cancelled.

“Jeannie wrote a book that everyone wanted, everyone loved, but then this one girl on the internet decided that she didn’t have the right to write a book like that.” The complainant, joined subsequently by many others, argued that the novel was an exercise in cultural appropriation given that Cummins herself was American, and not Mexican. (Cummins later countered that she was of Puerto Rican heritage.) “I mean, who doesn’t have a right to write a book on anything? It’s just insane. Poor Jeannie really was put through the wringer.”

All this, of course, gave Belle serious pause, and made her wonder whether she understood her chosen industry any more, which in recent years has become mired in identity politics and authenticity. To then have her own novel turned down by the same major publishers that had once so vigorously courted her only dispirited her further. “I think maybe publishers are a little leery [cautious] of women my age, or of white people?” she muses. For a moment, she frowns, and I half expect her to withdraw the statement, or qualify it, but she doesn’t. She shrugs. “I don’t know what the story is, really. Yes, I did take a long time off, but I have written four successful books, I do pilates, and I can still step up to a podium, so…” She trails off.

At the very least, she’s glad at last to be back, and in print once more. “I’m angry at myself that I let so much time pass, and that I walked away from something I love,” she says. But she’s encouraged, she adds, “that the reception for this novel so far has been really warm. So I’m going to write more books if” – and at this point she clutches at her heart, cautiously hopeful, “[my readers] will have me”.

‘Swanna in Love’ is published by Dead Ink