Stand

Have you ever felt your life hovering, waiting for something unnamed to break the surface and change you? In Me and Mr Booker, Cory Taylor argues—quietly, relentlessly—that a person’s first great entanglement often begins as waiting, then hardens into a story we tell ourselves to survive its consequences. Through Martha, a 16-year-old in a nameless Australian university town, Taylor contends that longing, secrecy, and adult failure create a gravity well that pulls a young person into adult desire before she can weigh what it will cost. She also suggests that consent inside such a vortex is never clean; it’s a bargain made among unequal parties, held together by charm, alcohol, and the town’s hunger for diversion.

At its surface, the book is a love (and not-love) story between Martha and Mr Booker, a married English film academic who first appears at a house party like a sunbeam—linen suit, red handkerchief, impossibly attentive eyes. Beneath that surface moves a darker current: a father, Victor, whose narcissism and volatility train Martha to calibrate herself to other people’s needs; a mother, Jessica, who clings to parties like oxygen; and a small town where everyone drinks, watches, and looks away. When Mrs Booker miscarries, when a cat is run over, when a cleaner walks in on a half-locked office tryst—these aren’t just incidents. They’re signals that the story’s center cannot hold.

What the novel contends

Taylor’s core claim is that desire, especially taboo desire, is sustained less by lust than by performance—by the lines we rehearse (“I’ll leave my wife,” “I’ll wait for you”), the roles we inherit (the harlot, the rake, the long-suffering spouse), and the stages we construct (cars, motels, cinema aisles, verandahs). People act, and then become the parts they act. Victor longs to be an actor; Mr Booker is a lecturer who scripts his charm; Martha learns to speak her lines. Everyone drinks to keep the scene going.

How the story works on you

You enter the book through Martha’s voice—wry, lucid, and bruised. She’s not naïve about the danger; she’s magnetized by it. Taylor draws you into the fever dream of first sex (in a motel with pink bedspreads, champagne, a body both "hard and soft"), then keeps you in the unglamorous aftermath: canceled Wednesdays, office doors left unlocked, a cleaner named April seeing too much, the office hipflask, the airport bar. It’s all deeply local and stubbornly ordinary. That persistence—of routine, of errands, of jobs that must be kept—is the novel’s point. Consequences are cumulative, not cinematic.

Why this matters beyond the plot

If you’ve ever wondered how someone “falls into” an affair they know will end badly, this book shows you how the ground slopes. The slope is made of small, plausible acts: a lift home; a hand on a shoulder; a kiss outside the bedroom where the wife sleeps; a Wednesday afternoon made available by a class schedule. The town’s isolation intensifies the slant. So does alcohol. So does a father who says love is like God—unseen, unquestioned—and then slaps you in the doorway of your room. Taylor’s small-town feels like the emotional cousin to Lorrie Moore’s midwestern suburbs or Alice Munro’s Ontario villages: outwardly calm, inwardly full of negotiation and private weather.

What you’ll find in this summary

We’ll trace Martha’s self-story—her belief that she is “waiting” for something and that the wait justifies risk. We’ll break apart the power and complicity inside the affair with Mr Booker (comparing Taylor’s moral clarity to novels like Nabokov’s Lolita and Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa). We’ll examine family damage: Victor’s theatrical cruelty, Jessica’s survival routine, and Eddie’s hardness. We’ll look at charm as a drug: the Bookers’ elegance, Motown and Sinatra, the golden Datsun, and why everyone drinks. Then we’ll map the town’s geography of entrapment against Martha’s departures: Sydney, the Five Ways Hotel, the airport farewell en route to Paris, and what “leaving” does and doesn’t cure.

Read this as a coming-of-age novel written in the key of aftermath. It doesn’t sensationalize. It listens to what people say when they are pretending not to say it. And it leaves you with a question you can use in your life: What story am I rehearsing—and what would happen if I put it down?

Martha opens with a confession: everything happened because she was waiting. Waiting is her worldview, her plot device, and her alibi. Taylor uses that single verb to explain how a smart girl can drift into an affair with a married teacher: you don’t jump; you lean toward whatever finally breaks the stillness. If you’ve ever told yourself you were just waiting for a sign, a person, a city—Martha is your mirror.

What waiting feels like

Martha lives in a town “miles from anywhere that mattered,” where even the air seems stuck. Her mother, Jessica, organizes perpetual parties to keep the weekends alive. Her father, Victor, is a man who loves the idea of movement (a bedroll in the car boot; a fantasy of a solo Pacific voyage) but never really moves. The whole place runs on beer, barbeque, and borrowed glamour. Under that ceiling, appetite has nowhere to go. It grows.

How waiting authorizes risk

When the Bookers arrive—English, scented, choreographed—Martha recognizes the signal. The linen suit, the witty patter (“As the actress said to the bishop”), the affectionate way Mr Booker says her name—these register as destiny. Waiting creates the logic: if you’ve been patient this long, surely you’re entitled to whoever arrives. That entitlement isn’t selfish; it’s a survival technique when you’re raised by people who forget you.

(In Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa, the narrator also reframes predation as romance by assigning it the weight of fate. Taylor’s Martha is less deceived about risk, more frank about wanting; both books capture the grammar of self-justification.)

The mechanics of drift

Taylor shows you the slide, not a shove: a lift to the bottle shop in the Bookers’ golden Datsun; perfume dabbed on a wrist; a balcony kiss while Mrs Booker sleeps; Wednesdays at a dog-scented airport motel where “the whole room vibrated” from takeoffs. Each scene is the size of a decision you could plausibly make. That’s the trap: single steps don’t feel dangerous; their sum does.

Waiting’s double bind

Martha believes waiting saved her from the small town. It also ensures she accepts scraps: late-night drives, cancellations, a hipflask apology, the cleaner who sees too much. She becomes a specialist in delayed gratification ("I’ll wait for you for as long as it takes"), then realizes delay is the point. When Mr Booker announces a trip to England with no firm return date, she finally names what waiting really is: a story that keeps you in place.

By the time Martha reaches the airport bar years later, bound for Paris, she understands. Waiting doesn’t end when the person leaves; it ends when you stop rehearsing the script that made the waiting feel noble. That’s the quiet victory Me and Mr Booker offers you.

Taylor never sermonizes about the ethics of a 34-year-old academic sleeping with a 16-year-old schoolgirl. She does something sharper: she lets the scenes make the argument. You sit through the bathroom kiss, the pink motel sheets, the whisky breath, the jokes, the apologies, the Wednesday schedules—and feel the power differential even when Martha feels powerful. That tension—desire + asymmetry—is the novel’s moral engine.

What Martha knows and doesn’t

Martha isn’t naïve about sex. She initiates as often as she’s pursued. She can be scathing (“Screw you”) and funny (“Arthur” is Mr Booker’s pet name for his penis). She sets terms: yes to motels; no to being seen; yes to risk; no to exposure that would ruin him. But she’s a child of chaos—trained to keep the peace, to decrypt moods, to use her body as currency in an economy where attention is scarce. That training is complicity by inheritance.

What Mr Booker knows and hides

Mr Booker wall-papers danger with charm. He loves performance (quotes T.S. Eliot; riffs in an Irish accent; hams up his Britishness). He is genuinely tender and genuinely selfish. He tells himself he cannot lie to his wife even as he lives a lie. He drinks to keep the part going. He performs regret when caught (at the races, kissing on a blanket as Mrs Booker approaches) and asks Martha to pause the play “for a while” so he can “sort something out.” Sorting never comes.

The town’s collusion

The setting lubricates everything. Everyone drinks; everyone is lonely; everyone minds everyone else’s business until it’s awkward, then politely turns away. The cinema provides literal darkness. Even discovery (April the cleaner walking in; Victor’s threat to shoot Mr Booker; the smashed pane of glass) doesn’t end it. Consequences sting but do not interrupt the show.

(Compare to Nabokov’s Lolita: Nabokov dazzles you with language to implicate your gaze; Taylor strips the glamour to implicate routine. Or to My Dark Vanessa: both show how an underage girl retrofits meaning to disproportionate power. Taylor’s restraint makes the power visible.)

Mrs Booker’s position

Mrs Booker isn’t just a foil; she’s collateral. She miscarries after a car crash born of panic. She later calls Martha a “harlot” at a party, but earlier she invites her to speak to the baby pressed under her ribs. She’s not an emblem of virtue or villainy; she’s a person trapped in a role, too. The book acknowledges her pain without simplifying it.

By the time Mr Booker tells Martha he’s leaving for England with no return date, you’ve already learned the book’s verdict: a man can love you and still choose himself; a girl can choose a man and still be choosing the role he needs her to play.

This book is not only about an affair; it’s about the family that makes the affair legible. Victor, the father, is the novel’s slow catastrophe. He’s funny until he’s cruel; theatrical until he’s violent; suicidal until the dog yaps and the bullet only grazes. He believes love doesn’t need to be demonstrated—like God. He writes letters requesting $25,000 “to keep the wolf from the door,” accuses Martha of “cavorting,” and then, in a scene of domestic horror, slaps her in the doorway. You don’t recover from parents like this; you adapt to them.

Jessica’s survival tactics

Jessica hosts parties to stay alive. She apologizes for Victor, helps him when he sets his room on fire, lets him park a caravan in the backyard “temporarily,” and still plans to leave town. She is wiser than she lets on (she likely knows about Mr Booker and Martha), but she’s exhausted. Her best act of love is logistical: she sells the house, engineers a path to Sydney, and makes it easier for Martha to move than to stay. That is what maternal care sometimes looks like under siege—quiet, administrative, decisive.

Eddie’s hardness

Eddie, the brother, is a study in male shutdown. He refuses to talk about the separation, drives a taxi, ferries the Bookers while judging them “pissed as newts,” and briefly shelters Victor. He’s loyal and unreachable at once. His silence performs a masculinity Victor admires—self-contained, punitive, allergic to vulnerability.

Rowena and Lorraine: alternate scripts

Rowena (the cousin) and Lorraine (the boarder) offer Martha other models: defiant, bawdy, unsentimental. Rowena has a baby with a gay friend and declares she’ll get her tubes tied; Lorraine screams in her car with the windows up and calls Mrs Booker a whiner. They’re not saints; they simply refuse the family’s silence. Around them, Martha gets a language for wanting something else.

If you carry family rehearsals into adult scenes, this novel invites you to notice. Then, like Jessica quietly does, make a practical move that changes the set.

Everything lovely in this book is also a lure: linen suits, piano standards, a perfume dabbed on a wrist, a golden Datsun, Guinness at a pub with a miniature English village in the garden, Billie Holiday at a party, Sinatra at full volume to drown a marital fight. Style smooths over misgivings and greases the slide. If you’ve ever been pulled forward by atmosphere—by how a person or a room makes you feel—this is your cautionary tale.

Choreographing charm

The Bookers are a pair from a film still. They talk over each other, smoke in spirals, banter about Britain’s decline, and make the heat shimmer. Even their argument styles are rehearsed. Mr Booker’s jokes (“As the actress said to the bishop”) both disarm and distance. Mrs Booker’s smoky glasses make her look blind, ethereal. You can understand why a lonely girl thinks joining their movie is her way out of the home video she’s stuck in.

Alcohol as set designer

Drinking is the novel’s sound bed. It sets the tempo (champagne at noon; whisky in cars; clove cigarettes in Indonesian packs), creates permission (people kiss in dark stalls; make adoption jokes; invite teen girls on shopping sprees), and explains away lapses. When Mr Booker says he’ll “sort something out,” the hipflask is already in hand. Alcohol, in Taylor’s telling, isn’t villain or scapegoat; it’s the solvent that keeps secrets from drying and cracking.

Cinema, music, and borrowed feeling

Films—The Graduate, Five Easy Pieces, Tokyo Story, Waiting for Godot—amplify the book’s themes. Mr Booker translates lines in the dark for Martha; he quotes as if quoting were feeling. Music does similar work: Motown on car radios; Cole Porter on the piano; Sinatra masking the caravan in the yard. The culture offers words for what the characters can’t say straight. That’s comforting and dangerous: you can mistake fluency in reference for honesty.

Style in Me and Mr Booker is like wattle blossom at dusk: sweet, enveloping, and a little dizzying. It’s lovely to walk through—and easy to get lost in.

Place in this novel is not backdrop; it’s destiny’s co-author. The nameless town—a university on a hill, pine forests that smell like wax, a lake where cars park under trees—compresses people into each other’s lives. Everyone is five minutes from everyone else’s front door. That proximity makes looking away both easy and complicit. Leaving becomes a sacrament: Sydney, a hotel at Five Ways, a Travelodge downhill, the airport bar with shining floors.

The small-town physics

In a place where you’re always seen, you grow skilled at being partially seen. Mr Booker learns which roads lead to scenic outcrops where rocks give cover. Martha learns how to slide from cinema shift to sofa bed to front room at her mother’s parties without being caught. Victor appears and disappears at will—motel, farm, caravan in the backyard, back to a flat. You become what a town like this requires: adaptive, silent, fast.

Sydney as hinge

Sydney represents air: Rowena’s harlequin poodles and the Leichhardt delicatessen; buses to Paddington; the Five Ways Hotel; the promise that if a man says he’ll meet you, he actually might. Mr Booker doesn’t come. But the trip clarifies stakes. On her forced return, Martha realizes the town is more trap than home. That knowledge powers the eventual move to Newtown and the choice to go to Paris.

Airports and thresholds

The book ends not with triumph but with a threshold. Mr Booker buys whisky at the airport bar and lists his grievances about academia. He kisses Martha and weaves away past a queue of travelers. She boards later, alone, for France. Airports in Taylor’s world are honesty machines: everyone shows what they’ll choose when there’s absolutely no turning back. He chooses the conference, the marriage, the role. She chooses a language to grow into.

If you’ve ever felt a place shaping your choices more than you’d like, Me and Mr Booker recognizes that pressure—and gives you a map out: not to a person, but to a different self.

Acting is the book’s master metaphor. Victor wanted to be an actor; Mr Booker lives by patter; Jessica maintains a hostess’s cheer while packing a life into boxes. Even Martha adopts roles: adopted daughter to the Bookers, secret lover, harlot, conscientious student. People speak their roles until the roles begin to speak them.

How performance sustains secrecy

Secrecy requires staging. Mr Booker chooses motels that smell like dogs because anonymity matters more than comfort. Martha positions herself at parties to be visible to Mr Booker and invisible to Mrs Booker. When the cleaner walks in on the unlocked office tryst, the play collapses for a beat—but only a beat. A new scene replaces it (a drive, a drink, a joke, a promise to be “sensible”).

Language as costume

Quotations and accents function like wardrobe. “As the actress said to the bishop” is a vaudeville shrug; Eliot and Beckett lines let Mr Booker sound profound while dodging the personal. Even Martha’s French lessons are a kind of armor—vocabulary to elevate a feeling that might otherwise feel shabby. Style isn’t just seduction here; it’s also cover.

When roles crack

There are ruptures: Mrs Booker’s public “harlot” at a party; Victor’s letter about buying a yacht with a bikini-clad ad clipped to it; the cat crushed under the car; the Christmas where the father forces the family from the table. These are scene changes. After each, characters rush to restore continuity. The book asks: what if you didn’t?

Taylor’s gift is to let the theater work until you can see its edges. Once you see them, you can step offstage.

For a story that courts scandal—teacher, schoolgirl, small town—Me and Mr Booker refuses melodrama. The fallout arrives in modest increments: a missed ride; a moderation meeting; a dentist appointment on the day they were meant to meet; the wife’s miscarriage; the “harlot” scene; a move to Newtown; an airport lift. That’s how harm often looks in real life: accretive, survivable, scarring.

Pain is distributed

Martha loses the fantasy of being chosen first. Mrs Booker loses a pregnancy and holds her dignity together with vodka and eyeliner. Mr Booker loses the car (totaled), his ease at work (students complain), and perhaps his own story about being a decent man. Jessica loses the house she loved to a necessary sale; Eddie loses Deirdre and hides in night shifts. Even Victor loses—pride, addresses, hearing in one ear—without learning what loss was sent to teach him.

What doesn’t happen matters

No arrest. No tabloid blow-up. No climactic confrontation in a school corridor. Taylor’s refusal is ethical: spectacle would let you off the hook by pretending harm is always visible and resolved in acts three and four. Instead, she leaves you with a more adult truth: people go on. They carry the weight in their manner of speaking, in the routes they drive, in which pubs they enter, in how they exit a room.

What healing looks like here

Healing is incremental, too. Jessica choosing a job in Sydney. Martha choosing a language school in Paris. Rowena choosing houses to renovate. Even Mr Booker, in his way, chooses continuity—staying with his wife, attending conferences, holding onto his lines. None of that is triumphant; it’s plausible. And plausibility is the book’s final kindness.

Cory Taylor has written a novel brave enough to refuse catharsis. She offers recognition instead—and, for readers who need it, permission to leave before the show ends.