Humpty Dumpty

Harold Rogers’s Humpty Dumpty is a sprawling, metafictional novel about a high-school sexual assault, the football culture that attempts to conceal it and the families whose private failures make the public catastrophe possible. Set primarily in Steubenville, Ohio, during the 2014–15 school year, it combines an omniscient third-person narrative with diaries, oral histories, memoir extracts, manifestos, footnotes and future updates. The narrator frequently admits that parts of the story are conjecture, warns that every witness is self-serving and promises only the “true truth” rather than the whole truth. This instability is central to the book: nearly everyone knows some portion of what happened, but each person edits the story into a version that permits continued life.

The principal family consists of former bookmaker John Rodgers, his Brazilian wife Beatriz and their seventeen-year-old twins, Darius and Anna. John, once known as Caesar, built his wealth through illegal sports gambling. He survived repeated investigations by the FBI and IRS and emerged with the confidence of a man who believes rules exist mainly for people not clever enough to evade them. He is charismatic, generous and capable of genuine affection, but his philosophy of allowing people to make their own mistakes often becomes an excuse not to intervene.

Beatriz met John in Las Vegas after escaping an abusive first marriage. She came from Ilha do Governador in Rio de Janeiro and had spent her youth yearning for fame, artistic distinction and escape. Her teenage lover was Luis Cunha, nicknamed Bem-te-vi, a seductive delinquent who introduced her to drugs and remained a symbol of the reckless life she might have lived. After becoming pregnant with the twins, she married John and attempted several unsuccessful careers before investing nearly all her ambition in motherhood.