Emma Forrest’s defense of Ben Affleck/glowing review of Gone Baby Gone in Friday’s Guardian is more than just your standard, short celebrity puff/think piece; it’s the short celebrity puff/think piece Forrest has been sitting on for years. There are four mentions of Affleck in the first fifty pages of Namedropper, Forrest’s first novel, which was probably the best thing to happen to teenage girls and the adults who are enamored with them since My So-Called Life. The mention that I remember most vividly comes from a passage in which the 16 year-old heroine, Viva, is explaining why she rebuffed an opportunity to meet with her estranged mother:

Last time my mother came out of the Buddhist retreat, she tried to set up a reunion with me. But I didn’t want to meet her. She’d been in a Buddhist retreat for five years. I know she wouldn’t have heard of Ben Affleck and that it would just annoy me.

The idea of knowing Ben Affleck comes up again and again in Namedropper, which was published a couple of years after Affleck won an Oscar for writing Good Will Hunting. Viva’s friends and nemeses either don’t know who Affleck is or can’t remember his name, which is just one element of the pop-culture obsessed heroine’s sense of isolation.  Forrest’s new appreciation of Affleck would seem to stand as Viva’s vindication. It contends that the former J. Lo consort “had this film in him” but was forced to keep it hidden “all the time that MTV had on heavy rotation a yacht-shot video of him caressing his bling fiancee’s ass.” In other words: what Forrest/Viva knew all along has now been revealed to rest of us. Read more here.