Jaded, 54-year-old Chicagoan David Lamb and his partner Tommie head off for a restorative camping trip in the woods. Nothing wrong with that, you may think, except that Tommie is an 11-year-old girl. You could reasonably claim that Nabokov has written this book already; yet Nadzam's debut is even more disturbing, as Tommie is no precocious Lolita, but a gap-toothed pre-teen whose very ordinariness is arresting: "The shorts hung around her pelvic bones and her stomach stuck out like a dirty spotted white sheet. It was grotesque. It was lovely." Even Lamb seems slightly taken aback by what he has got himself into: "Christ. He'd taken her for thirteen at least. Eleven. That was closer to five years old than it was to eighteen." But his litany of self-justification runs from spurious desire to preserve Tommie's innocence ("He wanted to protect her from the woman who would steal her away a day at a time") to monstrous fiction: "We'll say that in this story you're the princess, right? And I'm just the grizzly old guy who lives in the barn and cleans your feet." Zeitgeist? What zeitgeist?