Nicole Flattery
Bloomsbury, 2 March 2023
Available as: HB, 240pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781526612120
I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of Nothing Special via Netgally.
Nothing Special is a hard book for me to review. I tend to review mainly plot or character driven books, which both provide relative easy ways into a review: you can describe what happens (without spoilers!) or you can talk about the people in the book (without spoilers!). Then you can get into the atmosphere, the way the book makes you feel and so on.
With Nothing Special I'm afraid that neither approach will work, which is frustrating because I want to persuade you to read this rich, fascinating story. Plot? Yes, things do happen here, but they're the comforting jumble of everyday life (for value of "everyday life" that fit New York in the late 60s). Fascinating, textured coming and goings but difficult to summarise. Characters? There are indeed well delineated characters. In particular, 17 year old Mae, our window into this world, is a blizzard of a character, full of desires, hopes and already (at that young age) regrets. Her mother, and her mother's boyfriend Mikey, are also richly layered and well observed. But Mae is also vastly contradictory, and she is telling the story of her teens from the perspective of some thirty years later, commenting on it with a great deal of knowingness both about herself and about the events which bring her - brought her - into the orbit, if the distant orbit, of 60s celebrity Andy Warhol.
I'm not sure I can do justice to that, especially as there are really two Maes in the book, the impulsive (but is she?) young woman and the more resigned, but also more understanding, older one. And as the younger Mae, at least, changes and develops rapidly in the hothouse environment of Warhol's Factory, where she comes to work (although here, it's always the 'studio').
Mae has, for example, an affect of rather chilly detachment from what she's witnessing, but it's hard to tell whether that is actually meant to be how the 17 year old saw things, or if it was a teenage pose, an attitude, a protection against what are pretty intense emotional ups and downs. Or it may be an artefact of the older woman recalling her youth? Once I started asking myself questions like that (another arises in relation to Mae's relationship with her mother (who seems pretty unpleasant) and her mother's boyfriend Mikey (generally derided, but he seems one of the more likeable characters here)) the book became almost a hunt for clues, every phrase, every comment turned over and examined. I cam to no conclusions. We are left to wonder, and it's fascinating to do that.
We're also left to wonder about the detail of what is happening - and about what we're not told. Before reading this book I knew very little about Warhol (apart from the Campbell soup cans, and "famous for fifteen minutes") so I wasn't aware of how much in the book to take as literal. (A bit of research afterwards suggested, quite a lot). But actually that's not the right question, I think. What's more important here than "what really happened?" is "what is Mae thinking and feeling?"
For example, she's been employed (though doesn't actually get paid much) for transcribing tapes that will be used as the basis for an experimental novel "by" Warhol. (Incidentally, he's not often named in the book, and when he is, it's with no upper case in his name - like many of the other characters, even Mae's "I" is lower case - except when he is called "Drella", a nickname used by his associates based on "Dracula" and "Cinderella". Make what you want of that.) The content of these tapes horrifies but fascinates Mae and her fellow typists, and their developing relationship with them is central to the book - but the content is never directly described, though it is implied that it is degrading, exploitative. I'm left wondering what I would find if I ever read "a: A Novel"(it has NO reviews own Amazon!)
Another example might be Mae's introduction to and relationship with Warhol's whole operation. Presented here, it's the result of a more or less random chain of events followup a casual hookup she has with a man she meets in a department store. (Early ion the book Mae spends a lot of time in department stores hoping to get picked up). One might be forgiven for thinking she thereforelittle idea where she's going when she turns up to be interviewed for the typing role by "anita" (lower case "a"). But in the succeeding weeks, Mae (and the other typists) seem to have a near obsession with Warhol's circle, some of whose leading personalities appear on those tapes, an obsession that reminded me of the attitude some people have today towards their favourite social media stars and influencers.
While it's perfectly plausible to see this as something that has developed in the hothouse atmosphere of the 'studio' (albeit the typists are corralled in a distant corner, overlooked by the artists, actors and socialites who seem to spent their time lounging around and smoking at the centre of things) I also wondered whether there wasn't something much more intentional in young Mae's involvement, a deliberateness to her penetration of this social circle, its parties and schisms which the older woman has tried to play down but not completely erased?
Similar mysteries abound, so that, while at one level you might indeed say that little actually happens in this book, that wouldn't really be true. You need, as I said above, to pay close attention, and you need to approach everything Mae (both of them!) says with caution, but when you do, you will see all sorts of stuff going on - both about Mae's own circumstances and her growth and coming of age, and encapsulations of wider society at a cultural and emotional crossroads.
I keep coming back, in thinking about this book, to the TV series "Mad Men", some of whose plot threads depict the same 60s New York avant-garde scene. Of course "Mad Men" does it from a different and more privileged perspective this demimonde is a place to be visited and explored... before getting back on the train to a comfortable suburb. It's starkly obvious that Mae doesn't have such a safety net and there is often a sense of danger, of edginess, to the things she gets up to which is heightened by our not being told just how much "young Mae" understands (and intends) that.
Older Mae doesn't elucidate for us here, leaving several different alternatives open from her teenage self deliberately exploring this world, to her falling into it accidentally but then aligning with it, to rather darker interpretations.
By the end of the story I almost had the sense of reading a choose-you-own-adventure story, but with all the switches and alternatives obscured so that it seemed like several stories at once. This was at times overwhelming and confusing but also, increasingly grippy, and deeply thought provoking.
Far from an easy read, but a very rewarding book, I think.
For more information about Nothing Special, see the Bloomsbury website here.
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